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Monday, May 09, 2005
A Quick Hit of The Huff
The blogosphere is all aflutter about The Huffington Post and its team blog filled with celebrities, politicians, and other notables. As usual, I look to Ann Althouse for wisdom and she even provides a bonus, positioning a well-deserved kick to Walter Cronkite's tedious ass. Her three posts on this new website monstrosity were more enlightening and enjoyable than the multitude of glittery-but-bland entries being offered on the Huff.
It's apparent from just browsing through Huff what the problem is: a blog, like all kinds of good writing, is a particular point of view that makes interesting observations about the world around it. This is as true of a team blog - such as this one here (sorta, though Ian has more of a Special Guest Appearance status right now than Co-Star) - as about individually written blogs. For a team blog, the interaction of voices and shared concerns is part of the fun, creating its own dialogue to guide the blog's overall perspective.
Scanning through the first day of Huff's offerings, it's painfully clear that: one, there's too many voices, most of which aren't engaged with each other; and two, most of those voices just don't have anything interesting to say. They take positions, they present information, but many of them don't have much in the way of personality or writerly style. Of course, the same can be said of many blogs out there - perhaps even a majority - but the big-name approach to the Huff makes this shortcoming painfully obvious and a blow to expectations.
Far from being a salon of erudite culturati, The Huff is nothing more than a high-visibility Tower of Babel.
If it was possible to separate the different bloggers into different sections - sub-blogs to the uber-blog - then maybe I'd think there was hope for the Huff. If all I want to read is John Cusack or Larry David, I should be able to do so. Odds are, there'll be only a handful of the dozens of bloggers who'll interest me enough to tune in regularly - but if I have to wade through bunches of other bloggers I don't care about, then why the heck should I even try?
It's apparent from just browsing through Huff what the problem is: a blog, like all kinds of good writing, is a particular point of view that makes interesting observations about the world around it. This is as true of a team blog - such as this one here (sorta, though Ian has more of a Special Guest Appearance status right now than Co-Star) - as about individually written blogs. For a team blog, the interaction of voices and shared concerns is part of the fun, creating its own dialogue to guide the blog's overall perspective.
Scanning through the first day of Huff's offerings, it's painfully clear that: one, there's too many voices, most of which aren't engaged with each other; and two, most of those voices just don't have anything interesting to say. They take positions, they present information, but many of them don't have much in the way of personality or writerly style. Of course, the same can be said of many blogs out there - perhaps even a majority - but the big-name approach to the Huff makes this shortcoming painfully obvious and a blow to expectations.
Far from being a salon of erudite culturati, The Huff is nothing more than a high-visibility Tower of Babel.
If it was possible to separate the different bloggers into different sections - sub-blogs to the uber-blog - then maybe I'd think there was hope for the Huff. If all I want to read is John Cusack or Larry David, I should be able to do so. Odds are, there'll be only a handful of the dozens of bloggers who'll interest me enough to tune in regularly - but if I have to wade through bunches of other bloggers I don't care about, then why the heck should I even try?
