When celebrities blog!

To be fair, many of the posts on Huffington's site are not from Hollywood stars -- conservative economist Kevin Hassett, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and Nation columnist David Corn are among many there who've probably never been near a movie set. But the site's "featured posts" -- the ones published on the front page -- are all by people whose names are in lights. Huffington acknowledges that these people wouldn't have a hard time expressing their views elsewhere. If Larry David sent his post on John Bolton to the New York Times Op-Ed page, chances are the paper would have published it. But what's wrong with having a blog where busy people like David can just dash something off whenever the mood strikes them? Huffington asks. If you or I can have a blog, why can't Gwyneth Paltrow?

In an e-mail, Jay Rosen says that since he spoke to the Times in April, he has changed his thinking on the idea behind Huffington's site: "I have come to a more rounded view." He says that he remains "a skeptic," but the idea of celebrities blogging could prove fruitful: "Who knows how this will unfold, but I'd bet that one of the first things to draw big attention will be when one big name blogging at the Huffington Post attacks another blogging for the Huffington Post. Like, say, Nora Ephron blasts Norman Mailer, and Mailer blasts back: 'Obviously Nora did not read my post. If she had ...' You get the idea. When it happens between B-list bloggers it is boring. When it happens with big-name writers and moguls it is not."

Rosen is probably right; it would be great for Huffington's site if the sparks began to fly among her bloggers, if her dinner party turned into a brawl and if that brawl stretched across the Web, from her site to the millions of blogs online now. Because if you compare her site with Drudge's, what the Huffington Post seems to lack now is bite, and fight. Even the design signals the difference: Drudge is black, gray and big, and his caps-lock button has a tendency to get stuck in the "on" position. Visiting the handsome Huffington Post, by contrast, is like reading the news while enjoying a relaxing soak at a Brentwood spa -- the typeface is small, the "XXX WORLD EXCLUSIVE XXX" disclaimers are kept at bay, and the color scheme, a soothing emerald green highlighted with pastels, calms you down.

Drudge, who has made his distaste for Huffington's endeavor well known, is fond of taking his fight to his enemies. On Monday, he prominently featured a couple of links to articles critical of Huffington's launch. Huffington's site, meanwhile, doesn't mention Drudge anywhere, and she disclaims any desire to take on Drudge.

But would it be so bad if Huffington did act a bit more like Drudge? Say what you want about Matt Drudge -- call him a liar, a hack, a fool, a moralist -- you can't call him a failure. He runs an irresistible Web site. And whether or not you agree with his politics, and whether or not you put much stock in his occasional "WORLD EXCLUSIVES!!!!," what keeps you at his site is, as with all the best blogs, Drudge's own peculiar voice. And it's these obsessions -- with the sex lives of politicians, with "American Idol," with the Nielsen TV ratings, with bizarre weather stories -- that makes the Drudge Report compelling.

It would be unfair, after one day, to accuse Arianna Huffington's site of lacking a compelling worldview. "We see today as just the first day of a rollout," Huffington said. "It's not like a movie opening," whose pop-cultural value can be measured in one weekend's box office take. Instead, Huffington said, the success of her site will only be quantifiable over time. One measure will be profitability; at some point the site, which Huffington said has enough financing to run for a year, will begin to sell advertising space. Another measure is traffic. Huffington said the site received 1.2 million visits in a span of two hours on Monday, but it wasn't clear if she meant unique visitors, page views or hits -- all very different Web traffic concepts. (An assistant at the site's business office couldn't provide much guidance on this either.)

The most important measure for Huffington, though, is influence -- "a much less tangible measure about how we are affecting the national conversation." By that yardstick, she's certainly off to a good start. She has attracted some of the nation's cultural leaders to join her party, and on the first day, in the index that perhaps ought to matter most -- whether other bloggers are talking about her -- she has done well. The blog-monitoring site Technorati says that her blog, in its first day, was the talk of the Web. Fortunes turn quickly online, though, and what happens tomorrow is another story.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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