A Quick Surf of the Huffington PostWell, after all the ballyhoo and foofaraw,
the Huffington Post is finally here.
Showing that she's hip to the latest breaking news, the front cover has a Jeff Gannon story. But it's us Republican bloggers who are obsessing on that story, right? Actually it's a link to a Vanity Fair roundtable on L'affaire Gannon.
John Cusack
reports on his trip to Hunter Thompson's funeral.
The sun was shining and gunfire echoed as friends and family gathered and shot targets on the lawn. Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” booming. Books, notes, numbers, pills, bullets, totems and talismans everywhere. Outside his wife offered liquid acid to people in the driveway. In the kitchen where he took his life, a huge American flag overlooked his suicide. He was looking right at it.Sounds like the '70s never left us.
Ellen Degeneres
has a cause.
Late last year, Congress did away with a 34 year old regulation banning the government from selling any of the 37,000 wild horses running free across America’s western plains. Since the new rule was adopted, the Bureau of Land Management has sold over a thousand horses to private parties. At least 41 of them have been slaughtered and turned into dog food.There are a couple of non-left bloggers over there. But mostly the posts are about the trivial, as with Degeneres' piece. Hillary Rosen bitches about I-Pod not working with other music services than I-Tunes. Richard Bradley wonders why Hillary Rosen's upset. Greg Gutfeld asks for help with his recipe for lemon squares. Marshall Herskovitch wonders why there wasn't a bigger protest against "film sanitizing". There's nothing there that I would classify as must-read.
Update: One post in the last two hours. Sheesh, 250 bloggers and they're out of new content after 11 hours? Things are so bad that the Cusack and Degeneres posts are two of the four "Featured" posts!
One obvious problem (that needs to be fixed if the Huffington Post blog is going to succeed): No links to other blogs in the posts as yet. They do have a blogroll, but, perhaps predictably, it's skewed left and where they do have righty bloggers it's all the ones you'd expect: Power Line, Captain's Quarters, Ace of Spades, etc. All high-traffic blogs.
Other Voices:
Pam Meister at Lifelike
jumps for joy.
Buttermilk & Molasses hopes
Arianna hires an editor.
Laurence Simon has a blog that is all Arianna, all the time, called
Huffington is Full of Crap.
Michelle Malkin thinks that
it will succeed. The question is, succeed in what sense? If success is measured in eyeballs, I have no doubt that Michelle's right. But if success is measured in terms of changing the debate, of challenging the tired old left/right dichotomy, I doubt it. Yes, it will get eyeballs, just as that
kid who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek TNG gets eyeballs. It's got celebrities (although mostly ones who've slipped to the "B" and "C" lists). The question is whether the eyeballs will be enough to keep 250 celebs interested.
