Josh Harris: "Pseudo was a fake company."

Man, that's a strange article. In the process of burning through 25M, Pseudo managed to work hard to produce a lot of content-- it seems pretty disingenuous to 8-years later to call it a "fake company" and a "work of performance art." What appears more like performance art is the letter, which somehow tries to pin this all on Jayson Blair and his corporate masters. Weird.

Does anybody with more background on this care to elucidate?

I was there, part of the Pseudo team, and I can say that it was just one idea from being wildly successful - user generated content. We had done some amazing things with early streaming as one of the first realaudio sites. As with most ideas, the idea of user generated content was there but broadband lines were not what they are today - so the user content focus was chat - which we now know is not enough. I think Pseudo was doing some genuine innovating in streaming, high traffic sites, crawlers and intense live video (some shows were 7 hours long!). But in the end we only hear about the successes and the silent evidence of the failures usually goes unnoticed. I think Pseudo was what MTV would have been had it been 5 years too early in trying to go on the air.