The Time.com piece on Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington is at once both totally awed and a little too self-aware to be properly gracious…much like Arianna herself, if you listen to these guys.

The piece starts out complimenting Arianna on her ability to compliment, "In her hands, a compliment is the social equivalent of a Tomahawk missile, launched in stealth at a heavily researched target and perilously difficult to defend against."

See, if that sentence was a missile, it would boomerang because it was so backhanded. So Arianna's site has done well because she knows how to kiss ass?

Not exactly: She also knows how to use the Internet!

In his hands, the site is particularly adept at what's known as search-engine optimization — making Google love you. How it's done is complicated and mostly secret, but one illuminating example came after the death of actor Heath Ledger. HuffPo fashioned its story so that anyone Googling a variation on the words "Keith Ledger" would see the HuffPo story at the top of the search results, thus snagging people who didn't know the actor's unusual name. The higher up a story appears in Google search results, the more page views — and ad money — it brings in.

What a morbid example of the fecundity of a website that predicts viral stories as often as makes them. I hear in the author's voice a tarnish of Arianna-envy, but with the way of the web, Belinda Luscombe may be on HuffPost's blog-not-pay roll too for all we know.