Arianna Huffington

Our Female Hero of the Week is Arianna Huffington, blogger, opinionmaker, socialite and speaker at 2008’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Ms Huffington has been credited with single-handedly moving the image of the blogger away from the somewhat geeky man blogging from his living room, to the influential opinion maker, be it male or female, and with a glamourous edge.

Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington

Arianna became interested in the blogosphere in 2002, when bloggers proved their power in taking down Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott for racist remarks.

Her website, the Huffington Post, which was launched in 2005, has since been branded one of the most successful political blogs in the US. Its 4,000,000 unique users a month are testimony of just that.

It is interesting that her success probably has as much to do with her insight into politics, as it has to do with her colourful personality. Arianna was born Arianna Stassinopoulus; her father was an- occasionally- struggling newspaper publisher who no doubt passed the journalism gene on to his daughter, and her mother a multi-lingual devotee of an Indian guru.  Huffington studied at Cambridge, England, and went on to write her first of eleven books, the Female Woman, at the age of 22. A retort against the women’s liberation movement,  in it she put forward the idea that: women’s emancipation which insists on equal status and equal opportunity for distinctly female roles is to be supported, whereas liberation forces women into male roles, devalues femininity and is therefore not to be pursued.

Since then she has moved from being anti-liberation and pro-Republican, partly springing from her involvement in her former Huffington husband’s Senate bid in 1994,  to a more liberal view on politics, campaigning against Bush’s policy in Iraq. She is also an interestingly critical factor in the US mediascape, having spoken out against the US mainstream media for deceiving the American public on the decision to go to war in Iraq.

One of the busiest people in the blogosphere, Arianna’s work is well-rewarded, with rumours circulating that her website could raise up to $200 million. It will be interesting to find out from her at the Web Expo how she intends to make the site profitable, something it is not consistently doing at this point. For if she is not an Internet Hero, we don’t know who is.