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#HuffPuff My Favorite Hashtag Ever

A few years ago in a mansion in Los Angeles a Greek Socialite decided to empower her rich and influential friends by letting them write content for her and she would spread their words all over the internet. The socialite worked from her beautiful home and turned her blog into a business of sorts.

The socialite then started to allow citizen journalists to give her more free content, and though there were ads on the site, and sometimes they even used media that they may or may not have been entitled to use (see the image below) the socialite continued to pay her citizen journalists with pats on the head and exposure.

You see writers don’t need to be paid. What they need is exposure. Everyone lives in a mansion, this is just a hobby.

This weekend Arianna Huffington sold the Huffington Post to AOL for $315 million. Today, my heroes at Adbusters have launched a camgaign to Huff and Puff it to the ground. You see with a tiny deal like $315,000 there is no money left to pay the writers. Naturally Ms. Huffington will stay on as Editor In Chief and I’m sure she can afford several red pens so that she can teach the good folks at AOL how to get incredibly talented people to write content for free.

I’m going to lean back and enjoy the show. Hopefully the writers at Huffington Post will follow the advice offered at AdBusters and AOL will have bought themselves just a domain with limited content:

We’ll stop going to her site. And we’ll stop blogging for her too. Then we’ll give birth to an alternative to AOL’s HuffPo by using the #huffpuff hash tag to tell the world about our favorite counter-culture websites and indie blogs.

I’ll start here. If you’re looking for green parenting check out EcoChildsPlay.com.

Huffington Post takes pictures from users everywhere

4 thoughts on “#HuffPuff My Favorite Hashtag Ever”

  1. While I agree with and support the sentiments of HuffPuff, I also feel that if you were stupid enough to write for a site like HuffPo for free, you either don’t mind being taken advantage of or you’re too dumb to care. Either way, you probably got what you deserved. Nothing.

  2. I was one of the stupid people who wrote for free on HuffPo. It started with a heated political season and on some level I felt like I was doing a mitzvah. Then I kept noticing that every time Alec Baldwin or Jamie Leigh Curtis wrote something, it made the first page and stayed there for two weeks or until it was replaced with another celebrity article.

    I wrote a fantastic original series on poverty and it never got posted. When I had the audacity to ask why, all of my articles went straight to author “archives” which means they never made the pages of Huff — but I was encouraged to send out emails and tweets so people could visit my archives on their site and comment.

    Last month, I sent them a letter requesting that my blogger account and all of my articles be removed. They did not respond and the articles are still there.

    Yes, I feel like a fool.

  3. Sidenote: Ariana was once a Republican. I believe in my heart of hearts that that never changed. She went with what was expedient and popular and then used the worst model of capitalism to make a wild profit.

    1. I still can’t figure out what is going on inside her head, but I know that she’s utterly dishonest. And it is quite possible that she even undertook the whole enterprise to weaken the left – we don’t know yet at this point of time.
      In any case, there is a really wonderful place to go, and you are very welcome on planet.POV! (I think all write for free there, but it is a real grassroot thing, not astroturf like the huffpuff. Interestingly people who link on Huff to the Planet have been instantly banned!)

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