Last night one of my best friends, a sister really, Richelle’s best friend, had her baby girl. I can’t wait to see her today.

Now for a little bit of this, and a little bit of that:

Looks like Saturday’s blogger meetup was on of the best yet: see our fearless meetup czar Scott’s summary, see Albert’s, and Neo‘s.

Lisa Williams’s (of H2Otown) post, and its discussion at PressThink have open my mind to a few things. Check it out. I need to write a dedicated piece to tie it all together.

Shelley is considering buying a Powerbook. I want one too.

Doc Searls wrote a thought provoking must read in Linux Journal: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. Those quotes from Edward Whiteacre, CEO of SBC are ummmmm…. well glad I don’t work there. That’s all I’m gonna say.

Technorati has improved its speed tremendously. Scaling a web service is difficult. Scaling one that consumes millions of blogs daily and provides the value-ads that Technorati does is an achievement.

Like others, my concern was over the rising confusion between OSM and another pre-existing effort’s name, and the co-opting of an ethos dear to many software engineers. The words “open source” have a storied history on the web. To see them appropriated like what OSM was attempting just rubbed me the wrong way.

I was mentioned in the Saturday’s Inquirer criticising OSM’s choice of name due to the piece I wrote at Philly Future: “Open Source Media – Anti-Open Source and Anti-Blogging?”

Dan Gillmor raised awareness of it in the tech community yesterday.

I did the same by submitting the story to Slashdot. A discussion is still taking place there on how “open source” has been reduced to so much marketing blather (yeah I know – happened a long time ago – but not in such an obvious way if you ask me).

I emailed and discussed with ESR (yes that ESR – he’s from Philly ya know) – the legality of the name and he felt uneasy over their licensing.

And last but not least, Jeff Jarvis gave the folks at OSM some good advice that it looks like they are starting to follow.

OSM has removed the questionable licensing I objected to (without comment that I can see) and are now moving to change their name. Good for them. For a service that claimed to usher in a new age in journalism, the lack of feedback and transparency was painful to watch. This post is a move in the right direction.

Yesterday’s launch of Open Source Media could have gone by with little comment from me except to congratulate a group of well known bloggers on attempting something like Philly Future, except far grander in scope and size (which helps when you have millions of dollars of financing and big names pushing it). Instead what I see is troubling and hopefully will change.

OSM.org mission, in its words is to: is to expand the influence of weblogs by finding and promoting the best of them, providing bloggers with a forum to meet and share resources, and the chance to join a for-profit network that will give them additional leverage to pursue knowledge wherever they may find it.

An admirable mission. One much like Philly Future’s. I don’t look at commercialization as a negative thing. We are even part of an ad network for local Philadelphia advertisers. Among blogs in my personal aggregator are those from Weblogs Inc, Gawker Media, Metroblogging and Gothamist, and in two cases, Philly Future’s. But there’s much wrong with the implementation of this particular network so far.

While some have attacked the authors and concept behind OSM – that is not my concern. In fact, I applaud their effort.

I have a more serious set of concerns. Among them the the highjacking of an ethos that the site is the antithesis of. Read my thoughts on OSM at Philly Future.

I hope Tim O’Reilly, ESR, and other supporters of the concepts behind open source will set these folks straight. Lawrence Lessig should take a look as well.

It’s depressing to see “open source” reduced to so much marketing blather, in such a hypocritical way, by people who should know better.

Kinda like war == peace, now open == closed.