The Huffington Post is at the very least a marvel of organization, and a testament to the size of Huffington's Rolodex. Hundreds of smart, interesting, famous people, many of whom rarely speak out in other forums, have been given carte blanche to write about whatever they want, whenever they want, and to post their missives to the site themselves. In an interview on Monday, Huffington said the setup so far had proved successful. So many people were posting so much, she said, that the site's administrators faced the unexpected problem of early posts falling off the site's main blog page. Huffington was happy, too, that her contributors began blogging about one another's blog posts. "The response from the bloggers has been really thrilling," she said. "You had so many conversations going on, for instance Hilary Rosen and Richard Bradley going on about the iPod."
There was also Julia Louis-Dreyfus and husband Brad Hall's regrettable shtick about gay marriage (an idea better pulled off by comedy writer Adam Felber on his blog); playwright David Mamet's incoherent rant about computers; a nice tribute to Hunter Thompson by John Cusack; and Larry David's environmentalist wife Laurie's criticism of Ford's insufficient promotion of its hybrid vehicles. On Monday afternoon, Larry David popped up on the site with an inspired riff on why he sympathizes with John Bolton.
The site's main problem is in its abundance. In interviews, Huffington has described her site as a kind of dinner party, where hundreds of people are talking about dozens of subjects, whether art or politics or sex or whatever else they find interesting. (She's hardly the first to use that metaphor.) Today, though, the best blogs succeed on narrower grounds. You go to Daily Kos for its obsessive interest with lefty politics, and you go to Gizmodo for the latest in gadget news, while you visit most other blogs, from Andrew Sullivan's to Josh Marshall's to Rosie O'Donnell's, to experience a particular writer's unique take on the world. The Huffington Post is, by comparison, hard to figure out. What is its political sensibility? Who are its target readers? Are they people who like politics, or people who like art, or technology? Why should you read it, and what should you do with what you've read once you're done? Most important: Why would you go back?
"One thing that works well with politically oriented sites is the sense of outrage: We gotta do something now!" says Ken Layne, a longtime blogger who now writes at the new Sploid, the Gawker Media tabloid-news blog that has fashioned itself after the Drudge Report, and therefore something of a competitor to Huffington's site. "On Daily Kos or WorldNetDaily there's this sense, 'Jesus Christ the world's ending now and we know whose fault it is!'"
Layne concedes that, of course, reality is more complex than what you find on these sites, but he has a point -- when you read blogs you're looking for a unique, passionate voice. Judging from just the first day's dozens of posts, it's hard to discern a unique, passionate voice amid the cacophony. Indeed, the site reads a bit too much like a dinner party, where opinions are offered gently, not foisted aggressively, and where some people just ramble. "You've got David Mamet talking about aren't computers great -- what the fuck is that?" says Layne. "I couldn't even read that -- I respect his writing too much to read it."
Huffington, for her part, describes her site's point of view in the way Bill Clinton used to talk about his politics -- she's providing the third way, an information source different from the polarized debate that marks today's media culture. "The left-right way of looking at our world is obsolete and misleading," she says. "A lot of our issues are what I call '70 percent issues' -- issues where I don't think there's any broad disagreement, things we can solve if we can learn to speak to each other -- and that's one of the goals of the site." This middle-ground position is of a piece with Huffington's politics, but it can make for a blog that seems unfocused and lacking in verve. After all, does anyone go to a blog for a discussion of issues that most people agree on?
Huffington has also been criticized for her apparent belief that what the ailing American political culture needs now is more input from wealthy celebrities. "Do Americans really care what celebrities think about politics?" asks Glenn Reynolds, a law professor who runs the popular, right-leaning blog Instapundit. "People like to know who celebrities are sleeping with because they'd like to sleep with celebrities -- but we don't want to talk to celebrities about current affairs."
Xeni Jardin, one of the wizards who runs the group blog Boing Boing, points out another obvious problem with the idea of giving blogs to famous people: Celebrities don't exactly have a hard time getting themselves heard in the media as it is. "To me what's great about blogs is they provide a voice to people who didn't have voices in the past; they provide an avenue to information that was not accessible before blogs," Jardin said in an interview conducted before Huffington's site went live. "I don't get the idea of Walter Cronkite writing a blog. He's like a god to me, but I don't get that. People who have plenty of public exposure, they're exposed people." And Jay Rosen, the NYU media scholar and blogger, worries about whether we can ever take what celebrities say at face value. "Gwyneth Paltrow has no incentive to speak candidly and alienate future ticket buyers," he told the Times in April.
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