If you think about it, today’s MSM tends to focus on a very small slice out of the realm of human interests and experience. This is an opportunity.

Absolutely agree. Obviously not every book is going to get reviewed (between the UK and the US itís 150,000 new titles annually) but all people have to do to have a chance of being reviewed is to send in a copy. Iím sure that some will only send .pdfs for example.

Whether a specific title, CD, DVD, book, actually gets reviewed would depend on whether any specific blogger looked at the list of titles available and asked for that copy t o do so.

Whatever number you actually believe for active bloggers (8 million? 400,000?) we are, cumulatively, a vastly greater resource of experts than that known by any MSM organisation. It should, therefore, be possible to match pretty closely a new book with an expert on that subject.

Of course, many bloggers already do book reviews, which is great, and hopefully there will be a niche within Pajama for aggregation of such. Iím hoping that the syndication side of Pajama will mean that some of those will be picked up and run in the more traditional media as well. (Obviously, people would need to write in the standard 600 word format.)

What I think bloggers can really add is that many books never actually get a formal review anywhere, yet itís pretty much guaranteed that thereís a blogger who actually wants to read the new book on absolutely anything, from the latest Terry Pratchett novel to the Federal Tax Code Guide.

Thereís some competition with the Amazon reviews, of course, in one way we could see it as simply complementary to those, with the added chance (slim perhaps, but there) that a review would actually make it into the syndication process.

Thereís two things that would be needed to make this work.

1) Someone to badger publishers into providing review copies, list those copies available, send them out to bloggers who offer to review them, generally keep an eye on the system. I propose me, of course. (I assume this is unpaid, itís alright, I can see how to cover the expenses.)

2)Permission to tell publishers that this is, while not part of Pajama Media, something under consideration as an addition to the syndication service. (It doesnít matter how weak that consideration is, either).

With those two things in place I can start trying to get the free review copies that will get it going.

What does anyone else think? Obviously, the model can be extended to CDs, DVDs, video games and so on.

As an aside, I did read the previous post on, I believe, a server or email glitch that caused you to miss / lose several emails. As I was outside of that window with mine, I didn’t think it was the cause. Point being, you may want to let people who have not heard back know they should resend. There may be others like me wondering and not realizing their email was lost.

Just a thought. As Glenn and Charles are always swamped email-wise and understandably often can’t respond to individual emails, a blogger may be thinking this is SOP, as they are involved with PM.

Thank you, again, for the timely, clear response to my comment.

I hate to say this but we have been swamped. Therefore a few emails (evidently including yours) have slipped through the cracks. Please excuse us and resubmit your request to join@pajamasmedia.com. Information will be sent to you. No slight was intended, nor did we intend to blackball you or anybody else. It was simply an accident.

Roger

I’m wondering if I haven’t been passed over for some reason, or if one day I am going to get an email saying welcome, sign here agreeing to so and so and, oh, BTW, here’s the ads for your blog – to which, at this point, I’d simply say, thank you, no.

All I can conclude is that I am either out, or no discussion, or dissemination of how this is shaping up is happening outside of a few people. The interview with Kudlow, given he is on the editorial board was, pardon me, good cheerleading lacking in any real information. He basically ended saying “Yah! Pajama Media.” OK, Yah!, what?

We should opt for maximum transparency.

“and by exercising apparent political bias against certain websites, many of them bloggers…on their own Google News site. Now they seem to be on the brink of institutionalizing their bias through patented algorithms ranking news according to their authority system.”

Our political biases should be transparent as well, and any “authority system” should be post-hoc, which requires robust near-”real time” error correction.

I like reading what other readers have to say and I’m glad Roger plans to make comments an integral part of the new enterprise.