Businessweek’s Blogspotting has a podcast interview with Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is a ‘combination of a 24/7 news service and about 400 bloggers’. The primary role of the blog is to provide "instant commentary." It began publishing in May. It now has a million unique visitors a month.

They send blogs each day to Yahoo and AOL, and have just started a syndication arrangement with Tribune Media. Soon they will launch a weekly satirical news show on television and the net. Their main problem is dealing with comments. They have a backlog of 15,000 comments in moderation.

All this, and it sounds like they have around a dozen staff on the payroll. I remember when I started work on an online publication in the dotcom boom. I walked into the office on my first day and found that they had 50 full time staff. They hadn’t even launched.   After their first (and last) year, they had blown £10 million, mostly on advertising. Blogs have certainly changed the economics of online publishing.