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blogging for dollars
Posts Tagged “
Huffington Post
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blogging for dollars
breakdowns
Amazon.com S3 crash validates Web 2.0 haters
An unexplained failure briefly knocked out Amazon.com's Simple Storage Service this morning, taking with it parts of Twitter, The Huffington Post, and many other sites. You can track Amazon status yourself — see the red "Service disruption" icons under Status History. Has anyone yet built RescueTime for sites instead of people? We could park a Web 2.0 Failboard on our front page.
HuffingtonPost going local with Chicago section
The shrill cacophony of wealthy Democrats from Hollywood you've come to know and love on the Huffington Post will be coming to a major market near you soon enough, as the site will manicure content gardens for urban markets. Chicagoland bloggers now have any exciting opportunity to not get paid to contribute their opinions about local politics. [Guardian UK] (Photo by AP/Evan Agostini)
quotable
Arianna Huffington wants you to have a menage a trois
"The online vs. print debate is totally obsolete. It's as musty as the old barroom argument about Ginger vs. Mary Ann. It's 2008, why not have a three-way?" — Blog mogul Arianna Huffington, putting the sin in "synergy" for BusinessWeek, 22 May 2008
copyfight
RedLasso finally owns up to legal issues
RedLasso, a Philadelphia-based startup which serves as kind of a universal TiVo for embeddable clips, was issued a cease and desist letter by multiple networks today. The company, which has been cagey about the obvious copyright issues since I first ran into the startup at PodCamp Philly last year, even managed to pull a fast one on TechCrunch — Reuters ran the report of the legal issues before TechCrunch's post about the company went live this afternoon, prompting a half-hearted update. (C'mon, where's Michael Arrington's temper when it's actually appropriate?) If I were RedLasso, I would have made friendly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation before making nice with the Huffington Post and other publishers (including Gawker Media), which now face scads of dead-embed posts in their archives.
blogging for dollars
Who will discover Arianna Huffington's algorithim for vileness?
"If all those geniuses working in Silicon Valley could come up with a way to screen for those vile comments," as Arianna Huffingon mused on KQED's Forum, would her Huffington Post blog empire be empowered to delete meanness from the blogosphere? Sounds like a challenge. Maybe Google can inspire its engineers by changing its slogan to "Don't be vile."
lazy valleywag
What's Sergey Brin doing with Arianna Huffington in Tahiti?
Google cofounder Sergey Brin is, two days away from his company's first-quarter earnings call, sunning himself in Tahiti. As is Greco-American blog tycoon Arianna Huffington and Wendi Deng, wife of News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch. Huffington is reportedly there on vacation, but it's a stretch to think Brin and Deng are also there by sheer coincidence. Anyone have a bead on what prompted the South Pacific power summit? Do let us know your theories.
stats
The fall of Drudge is greatly exaggerated
Is the Drudge Report shrinking? One blog thinks so, and cites Alexa data — by far the most inaccurate of the website-measurement sites — to prove it. Is Drudge shrinking? No, but it also isn't growing as fast as some other sites, including the 3-year old Huffington Post. HuffPo has certainly grown its readership, recently passing 3 million unique visitors per month. But where it really matters — total visits and daily uniques, the number of people who come back every day — Drudge continues to dominate. All the more impressive, since Drudge maintains a tiny two-person staff, while HuffPo's fills a SoHo office. The sites compared by (more accurate) numbers: More »
media
HuffPo practices search engine pessimization
A tipster points out that horndogs Googling for "ashley dupre naked" get, as their first result, this search engine optimization page from the Huffington Post. It has a zillion search terms and three big ads on it, but no Ashley in the buff as promised. Not even a witty op-ed post. At least if you search for "ashley dupre photos" or "ashley dupre pictures" and click the Valleywag link atop the page, we deliver.
jermaine dupri
Music producer is right to defend bad business
Successful rap producer Jermaine Dupri probably didn't win any friends for his Huffington Post entry defending Jay-Z's decision to sell his new album American Gangster online only as a full album. Dupri may not be a polished spokesperson, and no one wants to hear, "Why do people not care how we — the people who make music — eat?" Not when it comes from someone tied as the sixteenth wealthiest hip-hop mogul. Or when that person also gets to sleep with Janet Jackson. But — I can't believe I'm saying this — Dupri is right. Of course, artists should have the right to determine how their creations are packaged. In admitting that it's about money, too, he's just being honest. Music is a business. It's about coming to mutually agreeable terms with the customer, not catering to his every whim. Even Steve Jobs lets musicians sell songs on Apple's iTunes in album-only packages. Ultimately, if consumers really have a problem with the way they do business, the artists will fail. That's their right, too.
blogging for dollars
IAC launches 23/6, a fake news site modeled on real failures
IAC and the Huffington Post brought fake news site 23/6 out of beta today. It only took them two years to come up with this? The site features political satire and targets people in the news with articles, videos and photos. If this sounds familiar, it's possibly because HBO and AOL already tried the same concept out with This Just In, to which the Wall Street Journal compares 23/6. The Journal does not note that This Just In shuttered in September. Another reason for pessimism? The site hasn't sold out its inventory for launch. It's currently running ads for BustedTees, another IAC company. Seriously, what kind of crappy blog displays ads from its parent company's network?
blogging for dollars
Don't have a cow if you can get the milk for free
Fishbowl watch: Simon Dumenco at AdAge slams Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post a second time for not paying their bloggers. But for most of Huffington Post's celebrity contributors, a blogger's paycheck wouldn't be worth the time it would take to cash it. HuffPo seems to be doing all right, which means the real compensation for a post there is the kind of in-crowd recognition that can't be bought.
"Erick, where do you get these revelations from? IPO? Just because a still money losing pure content company gets a new CEO? Thanks for bringing this great analytical mind to bear on TechCrunch." A commenter to new TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld on his post about an IPO for political blog network Huffington Post. [TechCrunch]
reality check
Tech blogger on HuffPo: "Can you say IPO?" Answer: "No."
The new editor at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, has gotten a little IPO-crazy in these heady days of Bubble 2.0. The best guess we've seen on a Huffington Post valuation is $60 million which, for a media company, is a drop in the bucket. We can't remember a tech or media company going public with a valuation anything like that. Huffington Post is the most unlikely IPO candidate since Wired in 1996 — and Wired had substantially more revenues and a real magazine business. Maybe we were onto something with the whole cheese thing. More likely? An acquisition. More »
The Huffington Post has named former CBSNews.com chief Betsy Morgan the political blog's new CEO, replacing cofounder Ken Lerer. One hopes that, unlike the site's columnists, she'll actually get paid. [Silicon Alley Insider]
blogging for dollars
Huffington Post raises more cash
At PaidContent, Rafat Ali picked up this interesting fact from a perfunctory USA Today profile of Arianna Huffington: Her company, The Huffington Post, has raised another $5 million in financing. With blogging companies in vogue with big media, though, that strikes me as small change. Huffington doesn't even pay most of her celebrity bloggers, so it's not clear what she would need the money for. But one wonders why she didn't take more money off the table. Could it be that, despite all the buzz, the Post's blog-for-free business model isn't all that hot?
google
Esther Wojcicki, did your journalism degree teach you disclosure?
Huffington Post's Esther Wojcicki gushes over Google's Lunar X Prize. It's not the $30 million those nice Google boys, Larry and Sergey, are offering whomever can successfully land a rover on the moon. This Palo Alto schoolmarm is keen on all the teaching tools the Lunar X Prize is providing educators. She writes, "The team at the Lunar Xprize has prepared free learning guides, videos and other resources to help stimulate student interest not only in space but in math, science and technology as well." She sees this as an effort to rectify the "anti-science trend in schools." Google's efforts are all well and good, but there's another reason why this journalism teacher is so sweet on Larry Page and Sergey Brin — she's Brin's mother-in-law. Her daughter Anne married him in May. But the Google ties go even deeper. Her daughter Susan Wojcicki is Google's VP of product managementand Susan's garage in Menlo Park served as the search engine's first headquarters. Even daughter Janet is married to a former Googler.
loren feldman
