cyberculture

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.