Boomerang

(Photograph by Chris Buck,  which appeared in New York Magazine in October 2006)

Ever see an unknown musician at a club and predict that he or she is “going to be huge” and it turned out you were 100 percent right?  When I saw Dave Grohl at the 9:30 Club back in 1989 – he was brutally abusing his drum set for Scream – I turned to my friend and said, “The band is average, but he’s one of the most entertaining drummers I’ve ever seen.”  A year or so later, Dave was in Nirvana.  Now, he’s “all that” for the Foos.   

In my 10-plus years in tech PR and journalism, I’ve had the chance to “call it” early and accurately on things like Napster going legit and using tiny TVs to sell airline tickets.  But only rarely have I had the chance to be “in on the ground floor” of a publication, be it online or in print, and accurately predict its future.  When Business 2.0, Brill’s Content, and The Industry Standard hit the scene, many of us (me included) thought they’d be around for a long time.  Oops.   

I got this one right though: I was one of the first people to make HuffingtonPost my primary stop for snarky political opinion and news.  I was initially led to the site just days after HuffPo went live by then radio commentator and current Senatorial candidate Al Franken, who mentioned on his Air America Radio show a post he did. I went, I read, I returned (daily). I told all my politically active friends: “This is the site we’ve been waiting for.”   

The formula for keeping me coming back every day is simple.  The content – from the minds of Christie Hefner, Harry Shearer, Hilary Rosen, Bill Press, and John Zogby even in the earliest days – was as plentiful as it was wonderful. It’s only gotten better; now the site boasts more than 1,800 bloggers (all of whom are unpaid) writing on an ever-expanding universe of topics.   

HuffPo last week celebrated its third year online and is now a force of nature (consistently top-ranked by both Technorati and Alexa), but back when I first discovered the site it was a tiny little island of ideology.  Most posts had just a handful of comments; nowadays, just about every post has hundreds (sometimes thousands) of comments.  The publication’s new tag line “The Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community” is the perfect descriptor. There’s something there for just about everyone.  

Arianna Huffington, one of the most powerful people on the Internet (and in American political discourse) is seemingly everywhere, selling her new book The Right is Wrong, and spreading her particular, peculiar brand of independent political thinking.  To wit, Arianna will speak on May 19^th at the Commonwealth Club here in San Francisco and you can bet I’ll be there, with the same excitement I had when I first saw Dave Grohl play that little stage at 930 F Street.