As one of the more engaging elections in recent years enters the final stretch, the Huffington Post is riding a wave of political influence and enviable growth. But will that all go away after the election? It’s a question that haunts CEO Betsy, and we raised it again today as part of a panel she participated in at WebbyConnect. She said the site expected content to skew heavily towards politics in the second half of the year, but once the race ends, they’ll begin to increase the mix of content, which hopefully users will stick around for. Those users with an “obsessive behavior” that simply can’t get enough campaign news and chatter might visit less frequently, she admits, but hopefully most of them will turn to other content—from the economy to America’s perception abroad and issues of the new administration. “We’re really ready to capitalize on those users. That’s our core.”

There’s no denying how much the site has benefited from the election season. Huffington Post’s traffic has quintupled in the past year with 4.5 million unique visits last month, WSJ reports. That’s more than double the traffic Drudge Report tracked last month: 2.1 million unique. A year ago, Drudge had 1.2 million unique visits to Huffington Post’s 792,000. Morgan said at WebbyConnect: “In the news-publishing space, there is now so many different alternatives and so many places you can go for news on the web. It can be just overwhelming.” Looking ahead, the site wants to drive more engagement with its audience and make sure they don’t “feel like they’re responding into a black hole.”

At sunset, the beachfront Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel resort, home to this year's WebbyConnect conference.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET News)

DANA POINT, Calif.–When the economy heads south, anything involving beaches and luxury resorts is a terrific recipe for guaranteed bad press.

That’s why there was a fine …

Aggregated from New York Times, The Social Blog

DANA POINT, Calif.–When political pundit Arianna Huffington, along with a team of digital-media veterans, launched political news aggregator The Huffington Post in 2005, critics were skeptical of the left-leaning site. But it’s turned out to be one of political journalism’s great recent success stories, even amid controversy …

View photo highlights from day 2 of WebbyConnect in Laguna, which include panelist Aaron Koblin from Google Creative Lab (above), Joan Walsh from Salon.com, Andy Cohen from Bravo and others!

Aggregated from PaidContent.org

You’ve heard of the mullet—the hairdo that is short in the front and long in the back. Or, as it is sometimes described, “business in the front, party in the back.” BuzzFeed recently compared the much-criticized hairstyle to a strategy being used by large media players that are adding user-generated content to their sites alongside (or near) their own editorial content. The theory got some airtime at the WebbyConnect conference today.

Read the entire article

Aggregated from jblogg.com

Im at the Webby Connect conference in Dana Point today, and once again The Webby team brought together some great minds in new media and got real discussions going. I wouldn’t normally Blog about a web conference but the panels today touched on some interesting trends in emerging creativity and …

Aggregated from foliomag.com

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher of New York Times Company, delivered the keynote address yesterday at WebbyConnect, a three-day summit on the future of media, which was organized by the producers of the Webby Awards and held in Dana Point, California.

Sulzberger, sometimes referred to by the nickname "Pinch," gave an interesting answer to the “Will there be a print edition of the New York Times in 10 years?” question:

“Let’s start with the fact that the heart of the answer must be we can’t care. We do care; I care very much. But we must be where people want us for our information. It’s the thought of cannibalizing yourself before somebody else cannibalizes you. So that’s one answer."

He also articulated what Andrew Sullivan and others (I’ll put myself in there) have been preaching about the need to link to competitors:

"Embracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors acting in effect like aggregators. Fundamentally we are addressing a common desire for comprehensiveness. The desire of people to find the news and information that they want from their most trusted sources. The era of the walled garden is over."

More from the Webby blog here …

Andy Cohen, senior VP, production and programming of Bravo, chats about the intersection of television and the Internet

Aaron Koblin from Google Creative Labs discusses “design and the elastic mind”

Aggregated from Outzonetv

Now that “Runway” and Kenley are over I need to know where y’all stand on “Top Design” Eddie. He is a piece of work, eh?

I am at the Webby conference in Laguna Beach. It is total folklore that people who come to web conferences are geeky; it ain’t so. There are some really interesting white hot webheads gathered in Laguna and the entire operation is under the purview of Rodger Berman, aka Rachel Zoe’s Rodger.

If you watched “The Rachel Zoe Project”, then you know Rodger isn’t going to pull together some hokey pokey group of people. That being said, it is my understanding that the other conferences concurrently underway down the hall are for Waste Management goulies and NRA freakazoids. What if some of the freakazoids and goulies mistake the web thing for their conference? Would the ‘net crash?

Oh and since I am at this Webby conference, I should mention some digital stuff that I’ve been finding…