The brand spanking new Huffington Post (Ariana’s celebrity group blog) is only hours old and already some genuine dialog can be found, in spite of the fact that the celebrities do not take comments.
On The Blog (which appears to contain posts from the less-famous authors in the Huffington stable), Hillary Rosen posted a plea for the iPod to be able to get music outside of iTunes. Less than 9 hours later, on the same page, Richard Bradley calls out her bullshit.
I had to laugh reading Hilary Rosen’s post, “Steve Jobs, Let My Music Go,” arguing that Jobs should open the iPod to non-Apple music formats. “Why am I complaining about this?” Rosen asks. “Why isn’t everyone?”
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I mean, why is Rosen complaining about this? As head of the RIAA, no one was more fervently anti-consumer than she. For years, Rosen defended the interests of the big record conglomerates, a group of companies which treated its customers with such contempt that millions of young people simply took to stealing music. Rosen doesn’t exactly have a lot of street cred with us consumers.
I don’t even know what Rosen is even doing posting on this supposedly-liberal site. Just because she’s a lesbian doesn’t mean she’s progressive.
As for the whole celebrity blogging idea, I’ll keep watching but the jury is still out.
Whoa! I’ve never seen one of my own trackbacks before. That’s really cool. (And yes, I know I’m easily impressed…)
Yeah, WordPress is pretty clever…
Once again, the mainstream media feel incredibly threatened by the idea that we can choose our own sources of information instead of being spoon-fed their pap.
It doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that her website is really poorly designed, just that it has enough celebrity magnitude to pull quite a lot of interested eyeballs.
I disagree. I honestly think Huffington’s effort is sort of an “anti-blog”. Aside from the issue that it doesn’t allow comments (I mean, Kinky Friedman’s campaign blog allows comments!), there’s something ify about a blog written by *only* the rich, powerful and famous (whatever their politics). If blogging is to be celebrated as a way for disparate voices to in theory receive a large readership, this blog seems to offer the opposite. It takes the format of a blog and celebrates the fact that only famous people write for it. These are not marginalized voices. They’re not even particularly interesting voices.
After reading this for a bit so many of the entries seemed forced to me. The ones that aren’t blogging about being famous are bending over backwards to be progressive, but in an awkward “justify my wealth” sort of way.
And do you honestly think the mainstream media feels threatened by this? That, say, the LA Weekly is seriously worried that Huffington might encroach on their readership?
Huffington’s blog is both a celebrity wankfest and inherently top-down.