Love it, loathe it or ignore it (as I do), in the blogging world the Huffington Post is hot. Which is what makes the current "troll and mole" controversy, that engulfed the site and led to the Post banning its own blogger Peter Rost, such a doozy.
For those who came late, the Post has banned Peter Rost for, in the words of the site co-founder Arianna Huffington "his refusal to act as part of our online community".
Sounds a bit Stasi, doesn't it?
Dr Rost got the boot after he exposed the identity of a persistent hostile poster to his blogs, known in the industry as a "troll", as in fact being the Post's own technology manager.
He also accused the troll, Andy Yaco-Mink, of manipulated the Post's voting system to get his hostile posts voted into the readers' favourites section.
Cue widespread panic at the Post. It took down Dr Rost's blog, then put back it up, then took away Dr Rost's password allowing him to blog.
Arianna herself has now been moved to blog on the snafu, apologising for the removal of Rost's blog, denying there was any manipulation of the readers' favourite vote and digging herself deeper into the mire by attempting to explain why the site had deregistered the good doctor.
Huffington said Dr Rost had been invited to blog on the pharmaceutical industry, as he was a former executive at Pfizer. But in a seeming justification for getting rid of him, she then said he had strayed from his brief, "his posts increasingly became about his personal grudges and beefs or long, self-referential, diary-like entries".
So a columnist/blogger disappoints when he starts writing long, self referential, diary like entries. Ground control to Major Arianna, welcome to the world of comment journalism!
It seems to me what she really means is that he didn't follow orders and became bolshie. The elephant in the room here, which Arianna did not mention, was that he also hugely embarrassed the Post by exposing the troll as a Post mole.
Dr Rost recounted the tale on his own blog, including a fiery response to Huffington, labelling her a lying liar.
Leaving alone the issue of the alleged manipulation of the readers' favourites vote, which Arianna denies, the Post's editorial practices are again being called into question. The site is vulnerable to accusations that its editorial integrity is warped - if its own employees cannot maintain neutrality. I wonder how its other contributors feel?
Arianna also took Dr Rost to task for holding personal vendettas and acting in an adversarial manner. But isn't petty postings the stuff of which blogging is all about, in contrast to the cerebral ideals of a good intellectual debate?
You can hardly criticise Dr Rost for commenting on the hottest issue in the blogosphere today.
Depressingly, its not the first time the Post, and its co-founder, has become controversial. In March Huffington apologised for posting a blog on her website she attributed to George Clooney, which was actually a compilation of quotes from other sources by the movie star.
So, guilty of bigging up her website by pretending a star had contributed to it when they hadn't, she is now guilty of a more nefarious crime.
If one of the best blogging sites in the world thinks it is okay to a) make up blogs and b) ban its contributors for exposing the uncomfortable truth, then I wonder what the shelf life for such a website is.
My reaction to the latest incident at HuffPost is the same kind of reaction I had with Google censoring its search engine in its oleaginous bid to please the Chinese government.
Let's end with a quote commonly attributed to Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
