The (Arianna) Huffington Post Blog and Birds of a Feather

Birds of a feather...flock together.

As a political centrist and multi-professional my day-to-day is filled with a lot of solid content. As a result, I am a great fan of the world of pseudo-glamour and its lack of that content - which creates a nice balance between the the two. Actually, that last phrase is redundant.

Arianna Huffington has a nice posting on a just clebrated party of the "the Vanguard...and the Old Guard". And you have to hand it to Arianna for having the chutzpah (audacity) to call her blog The Blog. But then again you have to know how to market yourself, and Arianna does, who doubts this?

Those deluded ones who think that the blogging movement is a collection of lone wolfs hacking away their bleary-eyed nights at their computers in the basements of tenement buildings (there are of course a few of those) should read this from Arianna on partying with the birds of the feather:

"Nick Denton of Gawker Media threw a party Wednesday night welcoming the Huffington Post to the neighborhood -- both to the Soho neighborhood, where our office is, and to the online neighborhood....

The media-centric crowd was mostly new media with a sprinkling of old -- and more than a few who straddle both....

There was much obsessive talk about the surging growth in online traffic and advertising. And the way old media moguls like Rupert Murdoch are set on becoming online media moguls as well. And the growing newspaper troubles -- including more layoffs at the New York Times and circulation drops at the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and San Francisco Chronicle."

So who are these feathery birds and their digital nests who were at this party?

Blogs and bloggers represented at the party....

Gossip

- Jessica Coen (show biz gossip and news)
- At Gawker (New York gossip and news) we were flabbergasted to read that Ronald McDonald had become a female in Japan.
- Defamer (L.A. gossip and news)
- Wonkette (Washington D.C. gossip)
- Sploid (tabloid news)

Social Networking

We were particularly intrigued by the mention of a site previously unknown to us, Dodgeball, a real-time mobile social networking system that we see as being a pioneering forerunner of wireless communciation for fun and business, home and work.

Avantgarde Media and Media Blogs

- Megnut in the person of Pyra-Labs (Blogger forerunner) co-founder Meg Hourihan
- Slate
- Elizabeth Spiers (MediaBistro)
- John Batelle
- Jake Dobkin of the Big Apple oriented Gothamist
- College Humor
- The Onion
- Salon

Representatives of Big Mainstream Media

- AOL in the persons of Jim Bankoff and Michael Wolfson

- Arianne writes:
"MSM representatives included Kit Seelye of the New York Times; Serena Torrey of New York magazine; Lloyd Grove of the Daily News; Peter Maass of the New York Times Magazine; Julia Rothwax and Josh Green of The Atlantic; and Lawrence O'Donnell of The McLaughlin Group and West Wing; with Jason Rapp of NYTimes.com; Eric Alterman; Joe Conason; Rufus Griscom of Nerve; Remy Stern and Maer Roshan of Radar; Nathan Richardson of WSJ Online; and Jeremy Phillips of News Corp among the straddlers."

Political Blogs

- Talking Points Memo

Erotica Blogs

- Fleshbot ("politically correct" erotica as long as you don't follow the links too far - if you do, make sure you have a strong anti-spy program or you may find your computer overrun with spyware and worse - you are warned)

Media Conclusion

So basically, blogging is taking off where other media may be fading. The message is the same, but only the media are changing. Marshall McLuhan of "the media is the message" would be pleased.

We were not invited, but then again, consider who else was NOT at the party.
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