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Columnist launches 300-person celebrity blog

Posted: 12/05/05 By: Paul Bradshaw
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An American blog with 300 authors – including a number of celebrities – has been launched by columnist and author Arianna Huffington.

Huffington Post features a raft of celebrity contributors including Larry David, Warren Beatty, David Geffen, David Mamet and Walter Kronkite. None are being paid.

However, Ms Huffington's employers, Tribune Media Services, are not being so generous, syndicating the blog's contents to newspapers and their websites.

The launch signals another move into the mainstream for the blog medium, with significant investment and a large team of programmers. Ms Huffington claims that "it combines the best elements of the old guard and the vanguard in a fresh and distinctive way… bringing a whole group of people into the blogosphere who haven't been a part of it".

But the blog has quickly attracted a number of spoof and hostile sites, including Huff and Blow, and the Bluffington Post.

Foremost among its critics is Laurence Simon, host of Huffington Is Full Of Crap and a writer who has been involved in a number of blogs with contributors numbering in the hundreds.

He points to a number of weaknesses in the blog: “Some people will think there's an upper limit to collaboration, but if it's done right, there isn't. Command-Post had a few hundred posters combing sources and collecting them at the start of the Iraq war and the 2004 election, but it was better-organized. Blogcritics has a few hundred reviewers - it's well-organised.

"Huffington Post is chaos. This isn't one 'anchor' figurehead virtually reading the prompter that's filled by a dozen writers on his staff. This is a few hundred anchors all screaming at once."

Other criticisms centre on the fact that the site has comments on news stories but not on the blog. "That's backwards," says Simon. "And elitist."

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