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The Huffington Post has been up for 20 minutes as I start to write this entry, so I guess it’s time for a review.
The site is evenly divided between blogs and news. The home page has intros to all the “featured posts” by celeb bloggers (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Mike Nichols, Ellen Degeneres, etc.) listed down the left-hand side of the page. A little digging turns of up lots of other blog posts from non-actor/directors, which, oddly, aren’t considered good enough to be “featured” on this initial day of the site.
The home page also has a button labeled, “The Blog.” This leads to a section containing posts by all the affiliated bloggers, including non-actor/directors—and many of these are excellent. The weakness of this section is that it’s a jumble of subjects and opposing views. It’s not like the group blogs we’re used to, like Power Line and Wizbang, where all the bloggers are on the same wavelength. It’s all over the place. There’s nothing unifying it or making sense out of it. And there’s quite a lot of it. You can check all the new stuff on Power Line or Wizbang quickly. This, it would take a substantial amount of time to get through.
Another button on the home page is labeled, “The News Wire.” This contains a long list of current news stories from all sorts of publications, each with a headline and a paragraph or two from the story. This also is long and unwieldy.
The best thing on the site, and the thing that will probably keep me coming back, is the right half of the front page. This is a Drudge-style news site, and in all likelihood is produced entirely by Andrew Breitbart, one of the few people on Earth experienced with successfully producing such a page, having done this for the Drudge Report since the beginning of that site. This part of The Huffington Post rocks. Andrew finds red-hot news from all over the world, presents it with a perfect headline, and links right to it.
The site’s brand-new, and it has some kinks to work out. I advise that they seek a way to tame that mass quantity of unrelated blog posts into something more manageable.
