The Huffington Post (Arianna Huffington's website) is on its second day. Farhad Manjoo of the Salon claims that it is intended to compete with the Drudge Report:
But whatever else it may be, the Huffington Post is not a left-wing Drudge Report. It is instead, you might say, both a lot more than Drudge and quite a bit less. It's not the disaster a riled Nikki Finke immediately proclaimed it to be in the L.A. Weekly (Finke, who has also written for Salon, called Huffington's new site "such a bomb that it's the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one") -- nothing that features a regular contribution from Larry David can be so quickly dismissed. But it is not revolutionary, either. Huffington's site is, quite simply, a daily news roundup married to a very big group blog (with, curiously, very few participants under the age of 40 -- and possibly 50) and little to no original reporting content; like most bloggers, Huffington's high-profile opiners are generally trolling topics well covered elsewhere.
The blogs, many of them written by celebrities, have no comments-ability, and the bloggers are free to talk about whatever they like. Quite a few of the bloggers are wingnuts, so Manjoo is right about the Huffington Post not being especially left-wing. But it's an interesting phenomenom in the blogging world: a megablog created in an instant. Whether that works remains to be seen.
Still, I don't quite get what Arianna hopes to achieve with the Huffington Post. If it's not intended to strengthen the liberal/progressive voice in the media, what is it for? To allow for political debates?