Emperor's New Pajamas: The Pajama Crew is doing its best impression of the MSM (deny, spin, deny, obfuscate) over their new name, Open Source Media, which, it turns out, is already taken.

We’re seeing a lot of blog traffic about this, so we thought we’d clear some things up. On Wednesday a blog and news site launched under the name “Open Source Media.” As you might guess, this left us a little perplexed, so we sent them an email and posted this. By 5:00 Thursday afternoon we had not received a response to our email, so we printed a copy and Fedexed it. They did, however, post something to their own site under the title “About Our Name."

Then, Thursday evening as we were drafting this post, “About Our Name” became unavailable again on their website. [It's back up. --Eno] We aren’t sure how to interpret that, so we’ll just go ahead and address the one response they did briefly make public.

Hmmmm. Sounds like something CBS would pull, doesn't it? Read the whole thing, as the pajama crowd would say. I got this link from Steve H., who -- along with Moxie and Jeff Jarvis -- is all over this circus.

Again, I've got nothing against this venture, misguided as I think it is, and I like many of the bloggers involved. I just . . . ah, f*ck it. Read Jeff's post instead.

Yet Open Source Media, the whatever-it-is, promises this — with more haughtiness than I’d ever heard from Dan Rather — on its prevaricating post about the name:

The goal of our enterprise is to bring gravitas and legitimacy to the blogosphere…

Oh, gag me with a mitre.

I don’t think that blogs need to have legitimacy laid upon them … and who died and made you the legitimizer?

And gravitas? Good God, big, old media has an oversupply of that. That’s what got them in such trouble. And that’s what we’re running away from.

Previously, I was merely amused and confused by whatever-we-should-call whatever-it-is. Now I’m cringing as I await the sound of trains crashing.

Isn't there someone, anyone, over at Pajama . . . er, Open Source . . . er, OSM . . . who can step forward and offer some transparency, honesty, and accountability on this? Dead silence instead.