Now that it's official, it might be worth taking a look at the new Huffington Post, featuring stars who are now blogging. I guess an online magazine has to have its fluff. This one feels more like an online "Topic A" given the rather strange mix of featured blogs:

• Julia-Louis Dreyfus and Brad Hall on marriage and gay marriage
• Mike Nichols (who last year joined the illustrious ranks of old men filmmakers fetishizing young women) on the death of metaphor
• David Mamet on getting acquianted with computers (which says something about the target audience of this "blog")
• Michael Isikoff on Nixon's psychic advisor

All of these are on the short side, even for blog posts. No point in challenging the readers, I guess. But it seems like a real missed opportunity. We can't get a sense of a writer's voice in 2-300 words. Maybe over time, but really, is our attention span supposed to be so crippled as to be beyond rehabilitation? Has commercial television forced our brains down an evolutionary path of 4-minute bursts of mild concentration?

Editorially, if they want to get outside of the well-worn path, then why not get some more provocative content, like Russell Crowe on why he hates politics, or Dennis Miller on why he thinks global warming is funny? Inquiring minds want to know.

Another prominent component is the news mix, which today places Tom Cruise's "Scientology Tent" next to torture in US prisons next to high school students coasting through school. In other words: entertainment news and hard news, side by side. Entertainment Tonight meets BBC World -- or should we say "Entertainment Weekly" meets the WSJ front-page news blurbs? Hey, it could work for me. Kinda sorta.

Most promising: Harry Shearer's "Eat the Press" column. He invites help:

If you're in the media business, and have a tasty story of the sausage-making process, this would be a fine place to serve it up. If you're a reader or viewer who sees more than Howard Kurtz or Eric Burns does, come on in and help out with the dishes.

Beyond the soon-to-be-very-tired food metaphors, there's an idea here: The idea is that the media have an agenda, all right, and it has precious little to do with poltical issues, at least the political issues of the outside world. It's an agenda, like that of most professions, that has to do with the politics, the economics, and the esthetics of the people who populate the profession itself.

The main disappointment here is that he calls for what he labels "Occam's Razor": "choose the simplest theory that fits the known facts. Plenty of time for windy theorizing later, and elsewhere." In other words, keep it simple to the point of simplistic -- which is less Occam's Razor and more the "Law of Parsimony," which came later. (Wikipedia on Occam's Razor.)

To be honest, the site does look interesting, but does have the feel of an online magazine rather than something that embraces the interactive potentials of online media. It's old media camped out in the internet. It's printed articles printed on screens instead of pulp. Since they call it a blog, at least have in all the buzzaballoo, one hopes that they will eventually try to venture into the new world with both feet.

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media girl also blogs at other places.