Farhad Manjoo

But whatever else it may be, the Huffington Post is not a left-wing Drudge Report. It is instead, you might say, both a lot more than Drudge and quite a bit less. It’s not the disaster a riled Nikki Finke immediately proclaimed it to be in the L.A. Weekly (Finke, who has also written for Salon, called Huffington’s new site “such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one”) — nothing that features a regular contribution from Larry David can be so quickly dismissed. But it is not revolutionary, either. Huffington’s site is, quite simply, a daily news roundup married to a very big group blog (with, curiously, very few participants under the age of 40 — and possibly 50) and little to no original reporting content; like most bloggers, Huffington’s high-profile opiners are generally trolling topics well covered elsewhere.

The one “exclusive” was an excerpt from Gerald Posner’s book “Secrets of the Kingdom,” to be released next week, which claims that the Saudi regime has set up an internal sabotage mechanism — “including radioactive ‘dirty bombs’” — that would “cripple Saudi Arabian oil production and distribution systems for decades” should anyone try to topple the government. Gripping stuff, but not an exclusive for very long. After all the hype, you can’t help looking at the site and asking, Is that all there is?

The Huffington Post is at the very least a marvel of organization, and a testament to the size of Huffington’s Rolodex. Hundreds of smart, interesting, famous people, many of whom rarely speak out in other forums, have been given carte blanche to write about whatever they want, whenever they want, and to post their missives to the site themselves. In an interview on Monday, Huffington said the setup so far had proved successful. So many people were posting so much, she said, that the site’s administrators faced the unexpected problem of early posts falling off the site’s main blog page. Huffington was happy, too, that her contributors began blogging about one another’s blog posts. “The response from the bloggers has been really thrilling,” she said. “You had so many conversations going on, for instance Hilary Rosen and Richard Bradley going on about the iPod.”

There was also Julia Louis-Dreyfus and husband Brad Hall’s regrettable shtick about gay marriage (an idea better pulled off by comedy writer Adam Felber on his blog); playwright David Mamet’s incoherent rant about computers; a nice tribute to Hunter Thompson by John Cusack; and Larry David’s environmentalist wife Laurie’s criticism of Ford’s insufficient promotion of its hybrid vehicles. On Monday afternoon, Larry David popped up on the site with an inspired riff on why he sympathizes with John Bolton.

The site’s main problem is in its abundance. In interviews, Huffington has described her site as a kind of dinner party, where hundreds of people are talking about dozens of subjects, whether art or politics or sex or whatever else they find interesting. (She’s hardly the first to use that metaphor.) Today, though, the best blogs succeed on narrower grounds. You go to Daily Kos for its obsessive interest with lefty politics, and you go to Gizmodo for the latest in gadget news, while you visit most other blogs, from Andrew Sullivan’s to Josh Marshall’s to Rosie O’Donnell’s, to experience a particular writer’s unique take on the world. The Huffington Post is, by comparison, hard to figure out. What is its political sensibility? Who are its target readers? Are they people who like politics, or people who like art, or technology? Why should you read it, and what should you do with what you’ve read once you’re done? Most important: Why would you go back?

“One thing that works well with politically oriented sites is the sense of outrage: We gotta do something now!” says Ken Layne, a longtime blogger who now writes at the new Sploid, the Gawker Media tabloid-news blog that has fashioned itself after the Drudge Report, and therefore something of a competitor to Huffington’s site. “On Daily Kos or WorldNetDaily there’s this sense, ‘Jesus Christ the world’s ending now and we know whose fault it is!’”

Layne concedes that, of course, reality is more complex than what you find on these sites, but he has a point — when you read blogs you’re looking for a unique, passionate voice. Judging from just the first day’s dozens of posts, it’s hard to discern a unique, passionate voice amid the cacophony. Indeed, the site reads a bit too much like a dinner party, where opinions are offered gently, not foisted aggressively, and where some people just ramble. “You’ve got David Mamet talking about aren’t computers great — what the fuck is that?” says Layne. “I couldn’t even read that — I respect his writing too much to read it.”

Huffington, for her part, describes her site’s point of view in the way Bill Clinton used to talk about his politics — she’s providing the third way, an information source different from the polarized debate that marks today’s media culture. “The left-right way of looking at our world is obsolete and misleading,” she says. “A lot of our issues are what I call ’70 percent issues’ — issues where I don’t think there’s any broad disagreement, things we can solve if we can learn to speak to each other — and that’s one of the goals of the site.” This middle-ground position is of a piece with Huffington’s politics, but it can make for a blog that seems unfocused and lacking in verve. After all, does anyone go to a blog for a discussion of issues that most people agree on?

Huffington has also been criticized for her apparent belief that what the ailing American political culture needs now is more input from wealthy celebrities. “Do Americans really care what celebrities think about politics?” asks Glenn Reynolds, a law professor who runs the popular, right-leaning blog Instapundit. “People like to know who celebrities are sleeping with because they’d like to sleep with celebrities — but we don’t want to talk to celebrities about current affairs.”

Xeni Jardin, one of the wizards who runs the group blog Boing Boing, points out another obvious problem with the idea of giving blogs to famous people: Celebrities don’t exactly have a hard time getting themselves heard in the media as it is. “To me what’s great about blogs is they provide a voice to people who didn’t have voices in the past; they provide an avenue to information that was not accessible before blogs,” Jardin said in an interview conducted before Huffington’s site went live. “I don’t get the idea of Walter Cronkite writing a blog. He’s like a god to me, but I don’t get that. People who have plenty of public exposure, they’re exposed people.” And Jay Rosen, the NYU media scholar and blogger, worries about whether we can ever take what celebrities say at face value. “Gwyneth Paltrow has no incentive to speak candidly and alienate future ticket buyers,” he told the Times in April.

To be fair, many of the posts on Huffington’s site are not from Hollywood stars — conservative economist Kevin Hassett, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren and Nation columnist David Corn are among many there who’ve probably never been near a movie set. But the site’s “featured posts” — the ones published on the front page — are all by people whose names are in lights. Huffington acknowledges that these people wouldn’t have a hard time expressing their views elsewhere. If Larry David sent his post on John Bolton to the New York Times Op-Ed page, chances are the paper would have published it. But what’s wrong with having a blog where busy people like David can just dash something off whenever the mood strikes them? Huffington asks. If you or I can have a blog, why can’t Gwyneth Paltrow?

In an e-mail, Jay Rosen says that since he spoke to the Times in April, he has changed his thinking on the idea behind Huffington’s site: “I have come to a more rounded view.” He says that he remains “a skeptic,” but the idea of celebrities blogging could prove fruitful: “Who knows how this will unfold, but I’d bet that one of the first things to draw big attention will be when one big name blogging at the Huffington Post attacks another blogging for the Huffington Post. Like, say, Nora Ephron blasts Norman Mailer, and Mailer blasts back: ‘Obviously Nora did not read my post. If she had …’ You get the idea. When it happens between B-list bloggers it is boring. When it happens with big-name writers and moguls it is not.”

Rosen is probably right; it would be great for Huffington’s site if the sparks began to fly among her bloggers, if her dinner party turned into a brawl and if that brawl stretched across the Web, from her site to the millions of blogs online now. Because if you compare her site with Drudge’s, what the Huffington Post seems to lack now is bite, and fight. Even the design signals the difference: Drudge is black, gray and big, and his caps-lock button has a tendency to get stuck in the “on” position. Visiting the handsome Huffington Post, by contrast, is like reading the news while enjoying a relaxing soak at a Brentwood spa — the typeface is small, the “XXX WORLD EXCLUSIVE XXX” disclaimers are kept at bay, and the color scheme, a soothing emerald green highlighted with pastels, calms you down.

Drudge, who has made his distaste for Huffington’s endeavor well known, is fond of taking his fight to his enemies. On Monday, he prominently featured a couple of links to articles critical of Huffington’s launch. Huffington’s site, meanwhile, doesn’t mention Drudge anywhere, and she disclaims any desire to take on Drudge.

But would it be so bad if Huffington did act a bit more like Drudge? Say what you want about Matt Drudge — call him a liar, a hack, a fool, a moralist — you can’t call him a failure. He runs an irresistible Web site. And whether or not you agree with his politics, and whether or not you put much stock in his occasional “WORLD EXCLUSIVES!!!!,” what keeps you at his site is, as with all the best blogs, Drudge’s own peculiar voice. And it’s these obsessions — with the sex lives of politicians, with “American Idol,” with the Nielsen TV ratings, with bizarre weather stories — that makes the Drudge Report compelling.

It would be unfair, after one day, to accuse Arianna Huffington’s site of lacking a compelling worldview. “We see today as just the first day of a rollout,” Huffington said. “It’s not like a movie opening,” whose pop-cultural value can be measured in one weekend’s box office take. Instead, Huffington said, the success of her site will only be quantifiable over time. One measure will be profitability; at some point the site, which Huffington said has enough financing to run for a year, will begin to sell advertising space. Another measure is traffic. Huffington said the site received 1.2 million visits in a span of two hours on Monday, but it wasn’t clear if she meant unique visitors, page views or hits — all very different Web traffic concepts. (An assistant at the site’s business office couldn’t provide much guidance on this either.)

The most important measure for Huffington, though, is influence — “a much less tangible measure about how we are affecting the national conversation.” By that yardstick, she’s certainly off to a good start. She has attracted some of the nation’s cultural leaders to join her party, and on the first day, in the index that perhaps ought to matter most — whether other bloggers are talking about her — she has done well. The blog-monitoring site Technorati says that her blog, in its first day, was the talk of the Web. Fortunes turn quickly online, though, and what happens tomorrow is another story.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

He uses the chocolate to plug up the leaking tank of acid — sulfuric acid reacts with sugar to form a kind of glue. The sodium, scraped into the shell of the cold capsule and splashed into a sealed bottle of water, makes for a handy time-delay bomb, which proves useful for blowing through a wall that blocks the group’s escape. The smoke from the cigarettes illuminates the bunker’s laser-beam security system that he has to get through to move through the bunker (no secret underground research lab is complete without lasers); MacGyver uses the binocular lens to aim the laser at its own control unit, shutting down the security system.

But how does he get out of the bunker? Oh, that’s the easy part: MacGyver finds a switch that controls the lights in an above-ground control tower. He flashes the lights on and off to send an SOS message in Morse code. The guys in the tower, realizing Mac’s in the bunker, alive, call off the missile — and for the first of 139 times during the show’s seven-year run from 1985 to 1992, MacGyver saves the day.

This first episode is nearly perfect. It neatly telegraphs MacGyver’s soul: A laid-back fellow oozing can-do heartland ingenuity, MacGyver is handsome but dorky, charming but self-effacing, a friend to orphans and children with disabilities, tolerant of people from foreign lands, and though he has every opportunity for indiscretion, he’s always a gentleman around women. MacGyver, played by the affable Richard Dean Anderson, works as a secret agent for a vaguely defined defense contractor whose intentions are always of the best sort. His gigs are of the usual action-hero variety — find stolen missiles, escape assassins, rescue civilians, humiliate dictators. But his near chastity, along with his staunch opposition to guns and capacity to solve every problem through the judicious application of chemistry and physics, sets him apart from other action stars. MacGyver is the thinking man’s hero.

Though, actually, when you go back to watch his adventures two decades after they first aired, you discover Mac’s target audience probably consisted mainly of boys, not men. I started watching the 139-episode DVD boxed set a few weeks ago, shortly after gadget blogs gleefully reported that Lee David Zlotoff, the series’ creator, said he was thinking of making a “MacGyver” movie. This jogged in me memories of boyhood, especially of how, after watching each MacGyver trick, I’d feel a bit invincible: I was small, but I was clever. Like MacGyver, I could take them.

But to adult eyes “MacGyver” is often too goofy by half. It’s not just that his tricks are improbable. At times — like when he interprets a deaf friend’s dreams to find clues to an impending missile theft — they seem to violate the show’s premise, that science beats brawn. In these instances, MacGyver doesn’t use science; he uses magic.

Then there are the children he befriends and the liberal orthodoxies he defends — tendencies that bump the show’s preachiness dial. Mac’s always popping up in foreign countries — Afghanistan, Myanmar — and running into kids and peasants who are oppressed by unsmiling overlords. In just about every second episode, he’s teaching kids about the dangers of guns, a position that, we learn in one episode, he came to as a boy, when a friend of his was killed by a gun. The antigun thing is a little specious, though: MacGyver’s got nothing but nothing but love for explosives, painful booby traps, fire extinguishers rigged up as projectiles, and enormous boulders that he sets up to fall on villains. The real reason he doesn’t use guns is obvious — he’d be able to shoot his way out of most traps, and that would be too easy.

I don’t mean to get down on “MacGyver.” There’s something in its flaws worthy of re-viewing, a particular moment in America preserved on TV. MacGyver is meant to exemplify a certain noble strain of American power. He doesn’t take the easy way out, and when in a jam, he uses what he finds around him to ingenious effect. If you strain you see a greater American story here too — that his ingenuity is frequently too good to be true, and leads to pat, uncomplicated endings that call for no greater reflection.

There’s also something striking about “MacGyver’s” moment in TV. Watch this show as a yardstick to measure how far we’ve come. Even the simplest dramas today — I’m looking at you, “CSI” — are complex and multilayered next to “MacGyver,” which underlines and explains everything, gums up all dialogue with exposition and introduces new, throwaway characters in each episode. There’s much hand-holding here: Even in foreign countries, everyone speaks English, every villain is one-dimensionally evil, and every tender moment is helped along by a swelling score.

But that’s why I hope someone makes a “MacGyver” movie. Mac needs a makeover. Lift him up to big-budget action standards — give him a story line that can span a couple of hours; give him a girl to love, but who may also cross him; give him a more complex mission (maybe to find out who’s putting all the salmonella in our salads?); and give the whole package fast, Paul Greengrass-style editing. Also, make sure one of his crazy solutions involves Mentos — people online go crazy for tricks with Mentos. Do all that and we might yet have a lasting American hero.

* * * * *

Read more of Salon’s Re-Viewed, offering a fresh look at great TV shows available on DVD.

I joined Salon in 2002, and since then I’ve written about, among other things, Smart Cars, robotic vacuum cleaners, muffin toasters, voting machines, architecture and 9/11, Tower Seven, Bill Clinton, Terri Schiavo, Florida’s elections, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” Malcolm Gladwell, Linux, Daniel Levitin, the copyright industries, Lawrence Lessig, The New York Times, Martha Stewart, a mnemonic to remember the Solar System’s planets, Google, garlic, stem cells, Comcast, Apple, Speedo, taxes, Social Security, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, the robots’ plan to take over the Earth, Howard Stern, Stringer Bell, Current TV, campaign finance reform, MoveOn, Howard Dean, Nintendo, Total Information Awareness, Java, Alice Waters, “The West Wing,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Washington Post, Judy Miller, and Hurricane Katrina.

I’m pretty sure there’s no other news outlet on the planet which would have given me such latitude, and I thank everyone here at Salon for that. I also want to thank all the readers who’ve read my work, not to mention praised me, hounded me, kept me up late at night swearing at the screen. Don’t ever change.

– Farhad Manjoo

It was thrilling not only for the splendor of the place — even their commodes are computerized — and the welcoming attitude of my hosts at the Authors@ program (the company buys your books and hands them out to employees for free), but also because Googlers seemed to intuitively grasp my argument and posed many penetrating questions.

Google records these things and posts them up on YouTube, so if you’re looking for something to watch while eating a sandwich at your desk, have at it:

Another thing on the book: I’ll be reading and signing at Book Passage in the San Francisco Ferry Building next week — 6 p.m. on Thursday, July 17.

If you’d like to talk about facts, rumors, conspiracy theories, and spin in the digital age, do stop by.

They were all fans of the first model, and they’re pretty happy about the new model’s new features. The reviewers say the phone’s 3G network access leads to a much zippier Internet experience, that its audio quality has been dramatically improved, and that it cozies up to Microsoft’s corporate e-mail system.

But there are some drawbacks, too: Mossberg finds the battery life lacking, and Pogue says that that the phone’s GPS antenna is too puny to be of much use.

Here’s Mossberg on the battery life:

More important, in daily use, I found the battery indicator on the new 3G model slipping below 20 percent by early afternoon or midafternoon on some days, and it entirely ran out of juice on one day. I overcame this problem by learning to use Wi-Fi instead of 3G whenever possible, turning down the screen brightness and even turning off 3G altogether, which the phone permits.

The iPhone 3G’s battery life is comparable to, or better than, that of some other 3G competitors. But they have replaceable batteries. The iPhone doesn’t.

And Pogue on GPS:

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone’s G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.

Instead, all it can do at this point is track your position as you drive along, representing you as a blue dot sliding along the roads of the map. Even then, the metal of a car or the buildings of Manhattan are often enough to block the iPhone’s view of the sky, leaving it just as confused as you are.

None of the reviewers were provided with applications that third-party developers are creating for the iPhone (these will go on sale at Apple’s online App Store). Mossberg, though, writes that he tried out some of these apps on an older phone, and was pleased with the results:

I tested a game that used the phone’s motion sensors to control the action, and I tested several programs from America Online (TWX), including AOL Instant Messenger; AOL Radio, which streams music from the Internet; and AOL’s Truveo video search engine. All worked very well.

These apps will also work on old iPhones as well as on the iPod Touch.

The iPhone 3G goes on sale Friday at 8 a.m. But some enterprising folks have gotten a hold of them already — check out the Boy Genius Report blog’s unboxing photos.

I talked about how to get an iPhone in my video for Current TV this week:

It wasn’t hard work. Dolan popped into Potomac Video one afternoon and asked if he could look at Bork’s movie file. “There sure are a lot of them,” the assistant manager replied. “Is it OK if I make a Xerox copy?”

That was OK with Dolan; weeks later, he published Bork’s rental history in the D.C. alt-weekly the Washington City Paper.

Bork’s taste in movies was itself unremarkable (“First off, despite what all you pervs were hoping, there’s not an X in the bunch, and hardly an R,” Dolan wrote). But the publication sparked outrage from groups on the right and the left — including the ACLU and People for the American Way, which had vehemently opposed Bork’s nomination.

In 1988, Congress, spurred by the fear that the press might now easily unearth all politicians’ movie habits, passed the Video Privacy Protection Act, which remains one of the strongest privacy laws in the nation. The law prohibits stores from disclosing video histories unless ordered to do so by a court — and even then, customers must be given “the opportunity to appear and contest the claim” of any party seeking to learn what you watched.

I tell you all this as a historical wind-up to yesterday’s shocking news: In the ongoing copyright battle between Viacom and Google, a judge ordered Google’s subsidiary YouTube to hand over an enormous trove of data identifying who watched what and when on the video-sharing site.

Viacom’s lawyers argued that they needed this data to prove that “infringing” videos — e.g., clips of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” — were more popular than non-infringing user-generated videos. Presumably, if it proves this, Viacom might prevail in its argument that YouTube’s bread-and-butter was illegal videos, and thus owes some of its success — and billions of dollars — to media companies.

The database in question is astonishingly broad: Viacom asked for 12 terabytes of logs (approximately 12,000 GB) that detail each instance in which someone pressed Play on a YouTube video, plus the YouTube username of the viewer who watched it, the date and time at which the user pressed Play, and the IP address of the viewer’s computer. The database covers videos seen both on YouTube as well as those embedded on other pages: If you’ve never visited YouTube but have clicked on a YouTube video from your daily newspaper’s Web site, you’re in the database.

Google objected to Viacom’s request on the grounds that producing the database would be expensive, time-consuming, and would invade YouTube users’ privacy. The judge — Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York — Judge Stanton dismissed all Google’s arguments. The company’s “privacy concerns are speculative,” he wrote. (PDF here.)

Such pat reasoning should give you a general sense of the depth of bone-headedness in Stanton’s ruling. As Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Robert Bork-inspired Video Privacy Protection Act applies not just to video cassettes but to “audio visual material” in general. Clearly it should apply here, and clearly, millions of YouTube users ought to have been given a chance to fight this invasion of our privacy.

But the real villain here isn’t Judge Stanton — it’s Viacom. I’ve previously raked the company over the coals for suing, rather than enjoying the fruits of, YouTube’s success (for instance last year, when it sacrificed potentially millions in ad dollars by pulling down the popular MTV clip of Britney Spears’ poor performance at the Video Music Awards).

But now Viacom’s sinking lower: Not content to fight just Google, the company looks to be manning the deck against us all. Sure, Judge Stanton might call this “speculative,” but think on it a bit: If Viacom’s willing to take on Google, what qualms will it have in suing you or me, recording industry-style, now that it knows what we did on YouTube? (Update: Viacom says it can’t use this data to sue you.)

All’s not lost. Google might manage to reverse this decision on appeal, and Viacom, gauging the outrage, could decide to withdraw or limit its request.

But our real hope here is legislative or regulatory action. Indeed, optimistic sorts might see a silver lining here.

As privacy scholar Jeffrey Rosen has written, “The politics of privacy tends to be largely reactive, fired by heartstring-tugging anecdotes that capture the public imagination.” Just as the airing of Robert Bork’s video history was the kick-start Congress needed to fix a clear privacy hole born out of then-new technology, this ruling might backfire on copyright holders, pushing lawmakers, finally, to curb the privacy-invading reach of copyright fights.

What we watch on YouTube is every bit as personal as what one rents from a store like Potomac Video. Indeed, it might be more private, and more salacious — imagine the fun you’d have if you were looking for unsavory data about a future Supreme Court nominee in 12 terabytes of YouTube logs!

In his floor speech in favor of the Video Privacy Protection Act, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy argued that new database technologies capable of tracking private behavior called for new privacy regulations. That was two decades ago — and it remains true, still.

——

Update: A representative for Viacom e-mailed me to say that I’m overreacting. “We have no ability (and absolutely no desire) to use this data to sue end-users,” he argued, pointing out that all discovery documents in the case are bound by this confidentiality agreement.

Under this agreement, no one at Viacom will get to see these YouTube logs — only Viacom’s outside lawyers and experts, as well as court personnel, will have access to the data. The agreement also restricts the data to this case alone, which would seem to prevent the company from using the logs to sue users individually.

Michael Fricklas, Viacom’s counsel, told the New York Times, “I can unequivocally state that we will not use any of this information to enforce rights against end users.” He added that the company is looking into ways to “anonymize” the logs “to enhance the security of information that will be produced.”