Arianna Huffington

"He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." - George Orwell

When the Huffington Post launched on May 9, 2005, most conservatives including myself, sneered. To be sure, there was plenty to sneer about, with the likes of John Cusack passing verbal gas about his experiences months earlier at Hunter S. Thompson's funeral. It was a clearinghouse of mostly worthless opinions, many of them from Hollywood.

Since then, HuffPo has evolved into something very different: the newspaper of the Internet, with a concerted strategy to expand into content verticals like Entertainment (going for the Perez Hilton link love) and Local, starting with a Chicago edition. It's doing real investigative journalism (meet Mayhill Fowler, Obama donor). They've hired serious investigative/research types like Nico Pitney away from the Center for American Progress.

Arianna confirmed this basic approach in her talk today at PDF, and it is scary.