Colbuffington Re-Post & Huffbert Nation

Stephen Colbert poked some fun this week at Arianna Huffington and the news aggregation practices of The Huffington Post. Colbert complained that the HuffPo is embedding videos from his show without payment, “I have yet to receive my percentage of the Huff bucks.”

With that he introduced his new site, “The “Colbuffington Re-post.” Arianna, every bit the shrewd pageview monetizing netizen, took advantage of the opportunity to launch “Huffbert Nation.” The CSMonitor says it’s all an educational exercise:

It may be tempting to call for a tired-baby timeout. But all Comedy Central has to do to resolve the issue is deny permission, points out intellectual-property lawyer Mitchell Stein, a partner at Sullivan & Worcester in New York. “The Huffington Post can’t embed video from any site if that site doesn’t give permission,” he says…

“This is really about Colbert raising the issue of what original content really means in today’s Internet-savvy world,” says Amber Day, author of the just-published book, “Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.” [link]

Colbert is also drawing attention to the opposite of original content – the websites (including The Huffington Post) that aggregate content produced by other websites. By raising this issue, says Ms. Day, Colbert is pushing his agenda of getting people to think about where their opinions and ideas really originate.

I’m betting Ariana’s a guest on Colbert this week.