Well, if you wanted to have a symbolic place to launch a new weblog media property, the Rainbow Room atop New York City's Rockefeller Center is as good a place as any to do it. Literally atop the offices of NBC and towering over other major media company headquarters, the Rainbow Room is nevertheless an unlikely place to launch a company that, according to its press kit, is dedicated to "the free and respectful exchange of ideas expressed through citizen journalists, coupled with a dedication to honesty and the truth." Open Source Media is being launched through a ".org" address, but with $3.5 million in first-round venture capital financing it's hardly a charity effort. Neither are many of its forthcoming authors folks from the hinterland wiping off their overalls to place fingers to keyboard: Judith Miller is very recently ex of The New York Times and hardly low-profile. Other contributors (The Nation's Larry Corn, CNBC's Larry Kudlow, The New York Post's John Podhoretz and WSJ's Claudia Rosett) are also major media fixtures. We'll see how this goes, but it's certainly a mainstream approach to a media property launch. Weblogs are now thoroughly mainstream and seen as a key leverage point into the psyche of today's audiences.

Following are our live posts from the event, starting with a wrapup piece.