The purchase of the Huffington Post by AOL left many of the progressive writers and readers that made the site into a powerhouse looking for a new home."Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists," a post at Adbusters begins. "She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp." They continue that the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is theirs: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So they’re going to take it back.
"We are the ones who built the Huffington Post. And now we will be the ones who will huff & puff it down," Adbusters concluded.
They claim they’ll stop going to her site. And stop blogging for her too. Then they shall birth an alternative to AOL’s HuffPo by using the #huffpuff hash tag and ironically tell the world about their NEW favorite counter-culture websites and indie blogs. Kind of a counter-to the counter-culture corporate left tilted AOL owned left tilted website?
Damn that must be exhausting.
Look, it's a crap site full of pseudoscience and a large percentage of horse droppings. She sold it because she can. It's got her name on it, and she's going to make a fortune. But it's also AOL - and they have the anti-Midas touch. Like the Moldy touch. It seems that just about every venture that AOL has tackled has been put into the history books as "the worst business decision in history." Time Warner? Sending out CD's every week to everyone on the planet? Not considering DSL or Cable Modems as a serious threat to their business plan?
Surly, the death of the Huff-Puff is a foregone conclusion - and losing their fan base will only slightly accelerate its demise.
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