Building a Brand With a Blog

Building a Brand With a Blog - New York Times: "WHEN it began a year ago, The Huffington Post seemed like a remarkably bad idea. The brainchild of Arianna Huffington, the blog was intended to be a liberal counterpoint to The Drudge Report, featuring an elite list of Hollywood bloggers — Gwyneth Paltrow, Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton, among others — who would share their innermost leanings.

A year later, The Huffington Post has succeeded by failing. The promised missives from stars never much materialized, but the site is booming, fueled by rapid-fire news postings and more than 700 bloggers, most of whom you have never heard of. The Huffington Post had more than 1.3 million unique visitors last month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, and more than 2 million in February. "