Pajamas Media it is, again

Would-be blog moguls Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson have jettisoned the OSM identity they took when they jettisoned Open Source Media, the name that replaced their original working title of Pajamas Media. After several days of mostly bad blog press, they have changed back to Pajamas Media. They blame it all on The Man:

So how did this happen in the first place? Back at the beginning, certain, shall we say, paternalistically minded parties (i.e., the guys in suits) decided that we should act like grownups, and being as yet somewhat immature—at least as businesspeople--we did as we were told.

Which is how, one day, we ended up sitting around a conference table listening to representatives from a "branding" company. What followed is still a bit of a nightmarish blur, but it involved a PowerPoint presentation on the history of names, and such probing questions as, "If you were an animal, what animal would you be?" (Which is how we almost ended up as Jellyfish Media.)

The fleeing Pajamanians (I guess they can be called that again) are getting all kinds of unsolicited advice from observers who think the whole thing has been a bust so far. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, chairman of their editorial advisory board, is one. Blog evangelist Jeff Jarvis calls it a train wreck and says they should shut down, ditch the token liberals and reinvent as a right-side Huffington Post: "Stop with the salaries and fancy parties. Build a product and an audience first. The money is corrupting you, just like a bubblicious startup. It’s making you think you‘re big when you’re not even born. So step away from the checkbook." Simon posted over the weekend that he's been hurt by some of the harsh words sent his way. Hmm. He won't get any sympathy from the sizable share of the blogosphere that thinks he's in business with the creator of the biggest name-calling, hate-spewing website around (which also happens to be one of the highest-traffic Los Angeles-based blogs.