The Huffington Post

Has gotten off the ground. Nice clean layout, impressive cast of characters. Plenty of the kind of serious policy you'd expect: Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren on unfair credit card debt, Congressman Ed Markey on nuclear proliferation, and Activist Laurie David on Ford's inept advertising of its rather latecoming hybrid Escape are just three of the 57 (!) blogposts which have been posted today. That's right, 57. The archiving and sort functions leave a little to be desired; maybe as they collect more author bios and people add multiple posts there will better ways to sort so many articles.

Nothing particularly novel has caught my eye, except John Cusack memorializing Hunter Thompson. He's one of my favorite actors these days, the rare kind who seems to animate his roles with more inner grit than mere Method would allow. It's not often that I see an admirable performance and think I'd particularly like to hang out with the actor who gave it. (Note that this is usually the opposite with stage performances.) Cusack is a major exception to that. It will be fun to see if he keeps up this blogging thing.

In general though, this seems to be merely collecting the voices of people whom we already hear from. It's an interesting, high quality condensation of what would normally be diluted in a hundred op-ed and MyTurn pages, and the ridiculously high frequency makes it a good instant source of punditry. But it doesn't feel fundamentally bloggy to me. There's no trackback, and very little opportunity for commenting. Blogs thrive on things like unusual experiences, oddly angled points of view, photographs, snippets of obscure information thrown into relevant relief, and reader participation. What's really needed is a forum of this calibre where it becomes obvious that the writers are paying attention to the readers responses. If Arianna can pull that off, then I'll be really impressed.