What is a blog or a blogger? Arianna Huffington has gotten herself in hot water with HuffPo fans after “manufacturing” a blog entry for George Clooney from past interview responses, giving readers the impression that Clooney wrote the posting just for HuffPo.
At The Huffington Post, the colors, logos, headshots, bios, rubrics and timestamps visually unify all of the blog postings and say “we are of a kind.” And it is to Ms. Huffington’s credit that the quirks of each individual’s posting at the site — Mr. Clooney’s name and picture, as well as his syntax, his supposed choice of paragraph breaks and punctuation and his gathering rhetorical pitch — have the same implications as those of any reputable publication.
They say, “Hello, I’m the person responsible for putting these ideas together in this way. I then posted them to this blog. Or I e-mailed them to Arianna. Or I scribbled them onto a cocktail napkin and sent them to her by carrier pigeon. But at some point I crafted this train of thought in this way, and now I’m sharing it with you here.”
It’s not printed anywhere, of course, but the medium — the blog — carries that message.