The lunch dishes are mostly cleared now and the stars are already well down the elevator to their limos and offices, leaving the downstairs dining room at the Rainbow Room much like any other event in its aftermath. And that combination of factors pretty much sums up the birth of Open Source Media - an event very much in the control of mainstream media hands determined to shape a new entity that has street credentials wrapped around a traditional media core. In that sense it's a more conservative set's answer to the Huffington Post, a weblogging venture launched in May that has catapulted itself into prominence with a similarly diverse but opinioned array of contributors. Like HuffPost OSM will feature straight news content, in this instance provided by aggregator Newstex to wrap around commentary from their webloggers, so a formula that already works pretty well is being replicated to a certain degree. What's missing from this effort that's found at HuffPost is a central voice, someone who sets the tone and acts as a trusted docent to the content within. It's there in well-crafted set pieces at the top of the site's home page, but it's provided by "OSM staff." All in time, it's early days for this effort, but if you're trying to be "fair and balanced" and yet have people with very strong opinions it will be difficult finding the proverbial Walter Cronkite who will guide people through the site.

What's also missing from OSM is "the beef": webloggers "contributing" to OSM are so far all off-site, with a directory of links to their weblogs. This is somewhat odd, considering how easy it is for weblogs to be fed into another Web site via RSS. Is OSM just a news ticker with a blogroll? Without native weblog content and other community content such as comments there's very little unique content to draw people to this site.

An interesting feature of the OSM site is the "Blogjam" section, which was promised to provide a higher level of discussion than found in other editorial outlets. In essence Blogjam is a controlled comments section: a moderator sets a topic and then a selected panel of commentators takes it from there. The design is very slick, but in the Blogham piece provided for launch the points of view quickly degenerate into partisan talking points rather than intelligent discussion. The tools may be there for "raising the tone" of the debate, but the participants seem to have their marching orders.

As for the citizens' journalism aspects of this effort, OSM is not likely to be any more a true unbiased outlet than any other aggregator that collects content based on their own editorial opinions. That's not necessarily a bad thing - editorial opinion is what drives most valuable publications - but citizen's journalism is going to find its own channels with our without mainstream media types. The leveling factor of the Web is that people will click wherever they find the most value, with search engines and weblogs helping to point people to the content that will matter most to them in a given context. Open Source Media may have enough marketing punch to have a certain degree of success, but it won't be by lending "poor" citizen journalists a helping hand: they will be the lucky ones to have authentic grass roots journalists providing content on which they can hang their well-credentialed hats. In the meantime the buzz from this launch event is trickling away rapidly as the content that is supposed to be its primary rationale goes wanting.