Google Alert! Arianna Huffington, At AdTech, Believes In Blogs

If you think Huffington Post Founder Arianna Huffington's turning away from blogs and bloggers, think again.

In a speech at AdTech 2011 this morning, and in an announcement that's sure to raise the eyebrows of Google search kings like Matt Cutts, and send some at TechCrunch into shivers, the head of Huffington Post Media and AOL's main editor said that "we're going to expand our blog across all AOL platforms."

This blogger takes that to mean the tech news blog TechCrunch, and other media owned by AOL.

And from the perspective of content arbiters like Mr. Cutts, Ms. Huffington sounded a call of support for the news aggregator, and essentially said that AOL will be a content farm.

Take that, Google! Where Mr. Cutts has reportedly launched a war against so-called "content farms" like Gather, Demand Media, and what used to be called Associated Content - all, which hate being called content farms, by the way.

Moreover, Huffington's not turning away from bloggers, but says they're part of the foundation that created Huffington's Post's gantry for success. (I'm paraphrasing here.)

As this blog post is written, a video of Arianna Huffington's entire 43 minute speech and Q and A is being compressed and will be uploaded this afternoon, before 4 PM.

Stay tuned and follow Zennie62 on Twitter. for more from AdTech.

Google Follow-Up

Also, word was passed that someone at Google PR was not pleased with this blogger's post called "Google Hater: Ad Tech VISA CMO Antonio Lucio Slams Giant."

The fact is, I don't "hate" Google, and had VISA CMO Lucio not made the statements he did, there would have been no foundation for the blog post. Think about it. Is anyone going to slam Google, basically paint the company as arrogant, and then turn around and say "I don't hate them"? No. Of course not. What they'd do is offer qualifying statements starting with "Well, I don't like..."

For me, Google is not one company, but many units. Google Search at times takes on practices that are open to question. Google News needs to be reformed to better embrace blogs and blog content. YouTube, a unit that's for all practical purposes not touched by Google, is fantastic.


Google CEO Larry Page was right to take back his company. It was starting to go the way of Yahoo: too big and in some units, a bit too careless. But as a whole, well, you can't take Google as a whole. And while many do, they're mistaken.

Clearing AdTech Decks: Jeff Cole and Flip And Cisco...

At AdTech UCLA Professor and Digital Media expert Jeff Cole gave a great evening keynote, where he said (among other things) that the print version of The San Francisco Chronicle was not going to last long. Afterward, I asked Cole about that, and his comment that Facebook was going to start a decline of sorts in about five years. The result was a great 16 minute teach-in, captured on video, using a Flip Video Camera:



Oh, for those who know that Flip Video Cameras are used here, a note: I'm pretty freaking mad with Cisco:



Stay tuned.