7 Reasons Tina Brown is Spanking Arianna Huffington’s Butt

About six months into the adventure, Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast news-and-comment website is already far superior to Arianna Huffington’s fantastically popular supra-blog Huffington Post. Why, you ask?

1. The Daily Beast delivers less content than HuffPo. Web users need people smart enough to tell us what to ignore. These people are called “editors.”

2. DB views the world with a cocked eyebrow. HuffPo is wide-eyed. Skeptics are more interesting to spend time with than believers.

3. When you’re hungry, DB is a funky buffet line. HuffPo is a food bank.

4. DB understands that politics exists within pop culture. HuffPo thinks pop culture is the sideshow to politics.

5. DB, despite its proprietor’s print heritage, understands that web users scan, dip and click. HuffPo, despite its web-native heritage, thinks web users “read articles.”

6. Daily Beast publishes some original work by accomplished professional writers who are paid for their work in U.S. dollars. HuffPo depends mostly on the generous contributions of people like you.

7. Daily Beast is easy on the eyes. HuffPo is a beast.

Friday Funnies: 23/6

When I heard that Barry Diller was launching a new comedy site along with the Huffington Post, I thought: Oh, great, let’s see what a scrambling media titan and a group of earnest liberals think is funny.

I’ll make this brief: 23/6 is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on the web since. . .well, let me think. A very long time.

My funny-on-the-web test consists exclusively of counting the flecks of spittle that land on my monitor that result from trying to restrain an explosive laugh. My first 10 minutes with 23/6 dampened my screen quite a bit. I think I see some bits of my tuna fish sandwich there.

Just a few highlights:

• “Dickipedia: Pervez Musharaf.”
• “Hillary’s Campaign Will Slap You Right Back.“
• “Pack of Cigarettes Has Added You as a Friend in Facebook“

The beauty of this stuff is how perfectly the folks behind this effort get the self-important mannerisms and hokey sense of “community” rampant on the Web. This is a brilliant effort at satirizing the web using its own toolkit.

Sad note: In attempt to justify itself, the parodies include little links to the “real” stories upon which they are based, creating an odd comedic experience. Those who don’t get the joke will presumably go ahead and read the article that will help explain the joke. What, then they go back and read the joke again? Can’t imagine that experience launching much spittle.

Anyhow, there’s nothing worse than someone trying to explain or analyze humor. Go to 23/6 right now. But I recommend flossing first.

Mea Culpa: I Was Right

Listen, I hate to admit it as much as anyone, but I was right.

They say a stopped clock is correct twice a day, and this is far more likely to explain my apparent prescience than, well, any real prescience. One of my tics is to hammer blindly at the low value of Web video, so every once in a while I’m bound to appear correct. 

Right after the YouTube/CNN debates, the event struck me as a period piece, a captured moment when user-generated Web video is riding high as the 2.0 fad-of-the-moment. I predicted there will be no YouTube debates for the 2012 elections, that pop media culture will have lapsed into another fad.

Last week it was announced that, in an attempt to exploit the e-democratic juggernaut without appearing to simply rip off the YT/CNN event, three Web media outfits will host a kind of poli-geek Webinar with the Democratic candidates.

On Sept. 12 Slate, Yahoo and the Huffington Post will take user-submitted e-mail questions and candidates will “answer” them, live-chat style. The event will permit users to mash up the answers, picking the candidates or topics they want to see and letting them ignore the others.

So it took only a couple of weeks for user-generated video to get flydumped along the pop media highway, with a Webinar taking its (momentary) place.

New prediction, and I know I’m pushing my luck here: Every Democratic candidate’s campaign will have a widget by February.

Unless they already do, and I’ve just missed it.