When I heard that Arianna Huffington was setting up The Huffington Post in 2005, I thought it was a joke. It sounded like the personal indulgence of a millionaire socialite who “didn’t get the web” or she’d have started 10 years earlier.

But it didn’t take long to find out how wrong I was. HuffPo, as it’s known, rapidly became a major force. The Observer called it the world’s most influential blog, and it helped inspire the Guardian’s own Comment is Free.

Huffington was born in Athens in 1950 as Arianna Stassinopoulos and made her initial impact in the UK. At university she was president of the Cambridge Union, before becoming a TV and radio personality and moving in with the late Bernard Levin, the sharpest newspaper columnist of the age.

She then left for the US, where she married Houston oil millionaire Michael Huffington. And when he ran for Congress as a Republican, Arianna got into American politics. It was an interest she retained after they divorced in 1998 – following 11 years of marriage – along with a chunk of his money and his surname.

Although The Huffington Post wasn’t a personal ego trip, plenty of
egos were involved. Arianna got everyone’s attention by enrolling lots of celebrities – initially, perhaps, her friends and contacts – to blog opinions and serious political commentaries.

Nor was HuffPo on the conservative right, like her former husband. Arianna had moved to the left and was closer to the Democrats. As it tuned out, an independent liberal voice was just what America wanted.

Today, HuffPo has so much content that it has turned into a newspaper, and that is how it styles itself: it uses a three-column newspaper-style grid with lots of small index pictures. It also has various newspapery departments including politics, business, entertainment and living.

And it has Green, an ecological section that takes in the environment, climate change, “crazy weather” and so on.

The main sections are supplemented by the Huffpost’s Big News Pages, which bring together all the stories about a particular topic. Examples include Russia Georgia War, Iran, Barack Obama, Oprah, Apple, Britney Spears, Sex, and Green Living. If you don’t see what you want, there’s a Huffington index that is somewhat like The New York Times.

Unlike most newspapers, readers can leave comments on any story, and they do. One piece on the current front page has accumulated almost 6,000 of them. HuffPo may have started hiring reporters and video makers, but the blog-based community is still an important part of the mix.

This month, more surprisingly, HuffPo has added Chicago, which marks its first attempt at providing a local newspaper within an internet newspaper. It has local information, local bloggers, and is edited by someone who used to work for the local paper. Huffington says: “We plan to roll out local versions of HuffPost in dozens of cities.”

Tomorrow, the world? Arianna has already conquered England, America and a large slice of the web, so why not …

Vodafone has become the latest mobile phone company in the UK to raise the cost of making a call to try and claw back some of the money lost through increased regulation, with prices for its pay-as-you-go customers due to rise by a third next month.

The move will heap further pain on consumers who already face a winter of financial strain as a result of increased household bills. Food prices have risen over 13%, according to the government’s own figures; British Gas has hiked gas prices by 35% and now the water companies have admitted that the average bill will increase faster than inflation – which is already running at a 16-year-high of 4.4% and expected to hit 5% in the autumn.

Vodafone, the UK’s second largest mobile phone company, has just under 11 million pay-as-you-go – or pre-pay – customers, who will see the cost of calling increase from 15p a minute to 20p from the start of September.

The company is also upping the cost of calling for any of its 7.5 million contract customers who exceed their monthly call allowances, from 12p a minute to 15p a minute.

It is also increasing the cost of calling 0871 numbers to 35p from 25p a minute and the cost of calling 0870 numbers – which many call centres use and are often chargeable from mobile phones – from 15p to 20p a minute.

Vodafone’s price rises come after rivals O2 and T-Mobile hiked their prices back in July. T-Mobile raised its prepaid minimum call charge from 10p to between 15p and 25p, depending on which tariff the customer is on.

Market leader O2, meanwhile, increased its minimum call charge for pay-as-you-go customers, who have not upgraded to a new tariff, from 10p to 20p. It has 11.5 million pre-pay customers.

Its new prices apply to all calls to standard UK landlines and UK mobiles, as well as international numbers and those starting with prefixes such as 0845.

Orange, meanwhile, has kept its prices for callers on its Racoon and older pre-pay tariffs at 15p a minute, while the price of calling on its newer pre-pay tariffs – such as Camel – are 20p a minute.

Contract customers who make calls outside their allowance to a landline or other Orange customer are charged 12p a minute, while for calls to other networks cost 35p a minute.

Vodafone said it has not increased its charges for about two years and said that only part of the reason for the price rises was “regulation”, but industry observers believe the operators are looking to hike charges to reclaim some of the money being lost as regulators look to cap prices.

The cost of making a call while overseas has already been hammered by EU telecoms commissioner Viviane Reding, but roaming calls make up just a fraction of the operator’s revenues. Far more important are so-called mobile termination rates – the charges mobile networks levy on each other and fixed-line operators to call mobiles – which account for about 20% of revenues and have become the focus of intense regulatory scrutiny in recent months.

Last year regulator Ofcom introduced a new set of price caps that slashed prices by between 10% and 45% for the UK’s five networks – O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone and 3 – to between 5.1p and 5.9p a minute. But more recently Reding has suggested rates should come down by 70% to 2p or less.