Miscellaneous

Huffington Post

By jeremyblachman

A friend told me to read this Jon Robin Baitz piece on the Huffington Post, about Samantha Power's resignation.  It's fine, except when I thought it was just getting started, it turned out that was the entire piece.  I don't know.  I don't usually read the Huffington Post.  It seems like it's turned into exactly the opposite of what it intended to be.  When it started, I feel like it was supposed to be a place where you could go to read important people's opinions about things, one place to aggregate a whole bunch of interesting thinkers, all content and no filler.  Instead, it's a garbage dump of what seem like hundreds of bloggers, posting mostly-useless posts about mostly nothing at all.  And instead of a gourmet restaurant where each dish is worthwhile, it's like a bin at a 99-cent store where, maybe, if you're lucky, you'll find a new comb.  Jon Robin Baitz had a brilliant set of posts about being forced out of Brothers & Sisters, and his experiences in LA and the TV business more generally.  Those were really interesting, but I only found them by accident, after they were mentioned on some other message board.  The Huffington Post is the opposite of a destination site for me: it's a place I never go unless someone insists I should.  I have no idea if there's anything worthwhile there, because even if there is, I can't find it and have no interest in looking.

Contrast this with Drudge, which I guess seems like it should be a garbage dump, but is actually great because from the 4 word headline, you know right away if you want to click on something, important stuff is at the top, it takes three seconds to scan the page and see if there's anything there, and then you're off.  Easy.  Not that I love Drudge, but at least it works.

I have no real point here.  I don't read the Huffington Post.  That's all.

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on March 08, 2008 (boomark / email).