Huffington Post Blog

Now this is fascinating.

We’ve had the occa­sional celebrity blog­ger. Neil Gaiman, Poppy Z Brite, Warren Ellis, Wil­liam Gibson. But the Huff­ing­ton Post’s Arianna Huff­ing­ton has come up with a slightly dif­fer­ent idea. With her access to the famous and influ­en­tial, she has appar­ently con­vinced them to blog… on her site. So, it’s one uni­fied place you can go to for good blog. She has some big names: Walter Cronkite; Diane Keaton; John Cusack, Dani­elle Crit­tenden, Larry Gel­bart, Irshad Manji. Is she paying them? It’s unclear. How is she get­ting money? There are no ads, no sub­scrip­tions… yet. This has been up about 8 days if you believe the banner (though the first post is actu­ally May 1). (And I feel both cool for find­ing out about it so quickly and very uncool for find­ing out about it so slowly…)

It’s a shift in the way blog­ging is done. I can’t see where it leads yet. It is a little bit about the reclam­a­tion of the ‘offi­cial’ right to an opin­ion through fame, polit­ics, status etc. The blog­ger came from nowhere to claim equal space next to Cronkite’s pon­ti­fic­a­tion from the broad­cast pulpit. What does it mean when Cronkite steps into the blog­ger’s arena? What does it mean when the editor of New­s­week steps straight into the same medium where the howl­ing crowd is decry­ing the magazine’s mis­takes? Most import­antly, why do these blogs, unlike any other blogs, have no space for response? These are one-way blogs, pul­pits again, not plat­forms for dis­cus­sion, although already even the den­iz­ens of her new space are asking that same ques­tion: where are the response mech­an­isms? I wanted to respond! And that will lead to another phe­nomenon: if Diane Keaton posts a response to John Cus­ack’s descrip­tion of attend­ing Hunter S Thom­spon’s memorial, and they start to have a con­ver­sa­tion, are we eaves­drop­ping on the famous? Does it become some sort of bizarre intel­lec­tual train­spot­ting? I for one can’t wait to listen in on Cronkite and Crit­tenden arguing about media power. But then will we feel per­mit­ted to intrude upon that conversation?

Is it pos­sible for the Inter­net to be a great lev­el­ling tool when the real world’s power struc­tures keep intrud­ing into it?