Pajama Party

For argument’s sake, let’s say that bloggers as pontificators who work in their pajamas, and assume that they'd like to earn enough from their writings to buy some street clothes. If so, then the new-launched and aptly-named advertising service Pajamas Media may be the answer to their pecuniary and sartorial dreams.

Thanks to Darren Rowse, writing in WebProNews, for pointing me to the open letter which reveals that Pajamas Media will be “working in two areas - aggregating blogs to increase corporate advertising and creating our own professional news service.”

The letter is written by New York author Roger L. Simon, whose works include “The Big Fix,” the offbeat detective yarn made into the movie starring Richard Dreyfuss. His collaborators in Pajamas Media include Mark Danziger, who contributes to the group-blog Winds of Change, and Charles Johnson, of the eclectic Little Green Footballs (apropos of my comment in yesterday’s blog, Johnson sells t-shits at $20 a pop to help support his site.)

I was not familiar with these bloggers before I peeked behind their pajamas, so to speak, but my cursory examination suggests they represent the spectrum of political commentators and probably want to build a network with an even greater diversity of views.

Danziger’s comments about Pajamas Media resonated with my own focus on business models. While he said much of the planning for this new network had to be carried on in private, he offered these insights which I will excerpt below in an abbreviated form:

“As someone who writes business models the way other folks do grocery lists,” says Danzinger, “(I believe) in the power of the Internet to disintermediate . . . middlemen in the economy (who) really do three things - they help you find things, they buffer supply, and they catalog information.”

He goes on to say: “Two of those three things are done better by information services, and one of them is done better by the manufacturer . . . And the questions will be how to build useful interfaces between that world and the highly structured world of advertisers, media consumers, and blog novices while respecting the dynamic nature of the blogs themselves.”

Interesting. I wish he and his collaborators well. Here’s one other useful bit from his post: “If you're a blogger and interested in signing up to Phase I, which will be - in simple terms - an ad network, send an email to join-(at)-pajamasmedia.com and you'll hear back about some next steps.”

One snarky note in closing. In his open letter, Simon writes: "With respect to advertising, we do not wish to go into competition with Henry Copeland's BlogAds (the political ad service that boomed during the 2004 election). That seems like a bit of poetic license, not a credible business plan. But, hell, what would I know. I'm just some guy sitting here in my pajamas.

Tom Abate MiniMediaGuy Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media