Huff Puff it down // #huffpuff

Posted on | February 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

The sale of independent blogging behemoth Huffington Post to AOL has caused outrage in global blogging communities and is broadly regarded as a shocking sell-out; Huff Post was regarded – both in the community and outside of it – as the prime example of how grass root micro journalism could not only match, but also topple, existing media regimes. Until now, that is, where megacorp AOL has tamed the beast.

Such infamy, however, will not go unopposed: Culture-jammers The Adbusters have launched a new campaign titled ‘Huff Puff’ in which they encourage former Huff Post bloggers to boycot the the Huff Post blog, but also build a new outlet for independent micro-journalism using Twitter and the hash-tag #huffpuff.

They write in their blog:

Socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp.

But the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti-corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we’re going to take it back.

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.

We are the ones who built the Huffington Post. And now we will be the ones who will huff & puff it down.

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