Over at Scared Monkeys, I saw this bitchily clever LA Weekly report that, far from panning out, Arianna Huffington's much touted "blogging" venture seems destined to be a bomb.

Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington's bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences.

It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out.

Of course, only the fawning mainstream media didn’t see this coming; instead, The New York Times, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times et al. were too busy breathlessly reporting Arianna’s big plans and bons mots to bother to do any reporting.

(Will this be followed by a book entitled "How I Discredited and Ruined the Blogosphere in Less Than 30 Days"?)

Just over a month ago, I predicted something like this, and what I want to know now is why the LA Weekly hasn't given me credit! Might it be because I'm not as good at penning snitty Hollywood phrases?

It's odd that this would happen just as the blogosphere is being scolded for not having a "code of ethics," and yes, yes, yes! I question the timing!

For the benefit of those who are now attacking blogs for a lack of ethics, here's what I said about Huffington last month:

I think there are degrees of lack of integrity. A smell test, if you will. And the Huffington kind of opportunism just doesn't pass mine. Even assuming all politicians are opportunists, there's something about changing political positions the way an actor might a wardrobe, calculating them for maximum flash and public attention, which turns me off completely.

I think there'll be more such antics, followed by more calls for nonsensical codes of ethics which can't be enforced, followed by a clamor for controls which can.

It goes without saying that I am unalterably opposed to any and all blog controls.

If anyone really thinks a thirty day waiting period for blogs would have worked in this case, I'd like to hear about it.

Sheesh!

UPDATE: James Lileks has written a scathingly funny review of the Huffy Blog, which he calls a "48-car celebrity freeway pile-up." Rubbernecking aside, he thinks the idea of celeblogging generally falls flat:

In the blogworld, a celebrity name adds no value whatsoever. If the blog’s good, the celebrity may earn some blogcred (oh, Lord, shoot me now for that one) for not sounding like someone who just emerged from the isolation tank of LA culture. But I really don’t care what Larry David thinks about John Bolton. I care what Larry David thinks about the itchy tags on shirts that scrape your neck, because I know that he can make a 12-part TV series that revolves around that detail, and George Will can’t.

UPDATE (05/18/05): In a post which should be widely read, Harvey at Bad Example has a ferociously eloquent post (obviously written from the heart) in which he discusses the personalized hard work which is the nature of blogging -- but which isn't the nature of Arianna:

She looks at the blogosphere as a single entity with enormous power, and she lusts after it with deepest envy. She has fantasies of stepping in with a cabal of sycophants and grabbing this power for herself so that she can control "the public's imagination". She's under the delusion that all the scandals exposed by the blogosphere in the last year or so are directed from a single point of control, as though there were a handle that could be pulled to steer all the blogs in a single direction.

What she wants is to grab that handle.

To mangle a line from the Matrix, "there is no handle".

Arianna, darling, the blogosphere isn't a machine to be controlled from a single point, it's a herd of cats, and it'll go where it sees fit in ways that can be neither controlled nor predicted. It's not an actually entity, but rather the sum total of the individual human lives behind every blog. If you persist in your insane beliefs to the contrary, your project will disintegrate before your eyes, leaving you alone, ignored, and wondering what went wrong.