How integral is your public persona to your blog’s success?

It’s hard for me to answer that, but I think that in general, the Internet is very personal, very intimate, so it requires voices behind opinions. At HP there is always a human being behind the expression of an opinion and—not just in my case, but in all the successful Internet ventures—you can identify a person behind the venture or the opinion expressed.

That’s true. I visit many different opinion blogs, and the anonymous ones don’t seem particularly legitimate. Their bloggers are just railing.

Even with comments, which are traditionally anonymous, our policy has been that you have to register to comment on the Huffington Post. Even from the early days when we could scarcely afford it, we invested in 24/7 comment moderation. We are the host, and we vouch for the nature of the discourse. So if people comment on your blog, they may be critical, but they are not going to be allowed to use ad hominem attacks. That is our policy on commenters: We do not want people hiding behind anonymity to act like trolls and take unfounded shots at someone.

There are those who dismiss political blogs as being too partisan, even intentionally unfair.

You know, fairness doesn’t mean you don’t have a position. It means that you are being fair to both sides. When you have a position on the war in Iraq—which we did, which was that we should not have gone in—everything we wrote, on both sides of the issue, had to be fact-checked, accurate and fair.

When you launched your blog, some in the press dismissed it as a vanity project and a superficial online soapbox for Hollywood liberals. Did that chilly reception ever make you question what you were doing?

There were a lot of people who did not expect us to succeed, and in fact, we did not know if it would succeed or not. I say in my book On Becoming Fearless, often the things you most want to do are the riskiest, and you don’t know if they are going to work or not. The lesson is, don’t be afraid of failing. If you are, you will shy away from anything with a component of risk, and the best things do have a component of risk. A lot of my friends said, "Why do you need that? You have your books, your column, your speaking. Why do you need to venture into the Internet? This is a young person’s business—twentysomethings do this." For me, this is a question of our lives. If we can follow our passion, sometimes we succeed and sometimes we fail. I know I’ve failed plenty of times.

Who was your first contributor?

The first person I invited to blog was Arthur Schlesinger. When I called and asked him to blog, he said to me, "What’s a blog? Why don’t I take you to lunch so you can tell me." So we went to the Century Club in New York, and he and I were the youngest people there. I talked to him about blogging, and he said to me, "I really don’t use email." I said, you can fax it to me, so he faxed me his blog. One day, soon after we met, the president gave a speech on the Yalta Accords, and Schlesinger had been a part of all that, and he blogged immediately about its meaning. This was exactly what we wanted to achieve.

The Huffington Post quickly went from being a blog offering opinions to a player in national events. I’m thinking specifically of your contrarian coverage of the Judith Miller episode [involving information on CIA employee Valerie Plame leaked by White House staff members, and the subsequent investigation led by special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald]. You asked a lot of very pointed questions that mainstream media sources overlooked.

That was exactly what we want to do. When the conventional wisdom was that Judy Miller was the Joan of Arc of journalists, we looked at that and said, "Was she really?" We wanted to expose her role in selling the president’s lies. The conventional wisdom is often wrong, and yet it congeals very quickly.