Today saw the launch of news and commentary website The Huffington Post UK. Rob Hinchcliffecommunity strategist for digital agency TH_NK casts a critical eye over the site and shares his thoughts.

According to her editorial in the inaugural edition of the HuffPost UK Arianna Huffington is excited to be joining this country's "thriving, innovative media culture". There have been a lot of adjectives thrown at the UK's media in the past few days, but 'thriving' and 'innovative' haven't really featured so much as 'sickening', 'disgusting' and 'appalling'.

Of course, the trials and tribulations of News Corp and Rebekah Brooks feature heavily on HuffPost UK's front page, and it's interesting to see how Arianna and her army of pro-celebrity bloggers approach the subject. Unfortunately the answer seems to be "a lot like all the other UK newspapers (except maybe the Sun)".

Yes, the slick curation is ever present with a labyrinthian navigational style that uses a wealth of aggregate content to tempt your mouse clicks; and the real-time innovations pioneered by the U.S site are present, including 'quick read' options for the time-pressed, 'latest update' streams in a live bog format, and more social call-to-action buttons than you shake a stick at.

But the HuffPost’s key strategy always seems to have been ‘come for the celebs, stay for the conversation’ and that approach doesn’t quite fit with the UK edition. Tracey Ullman and Ricky Gervais are two of the marquee names rolled out for the UK launch. Not exactly George Clooney and Scarlett Johannson are they (both have contributed to the Stateside version)? And while Zac Goldsmith and Sarah Brown fit more into the ‘glam with brains’ style that Arianna seems to favour, the actual content (parliamentary reform, and how today’s women can ‘have it all’) appears a little generic and stale next to the ‘Now! Now! Now!’ ethos of the rest of the site.

At the time of writing, the most up-to-date ‘celebrity’ comment comes from the ubiquitous Alastair Campbell, and even that is lifted wholesale from his personal blog.

But all these could be considered cosmetic problems (like changing the date format from the US style), nothing that can’t be fixed with a little editorial imagination. What’s going to be more interesting to watch is how the title builds on what is a good, old-fashioned geographical expansion and starts to dip its toes into more innovative pools.

Arianna must be looking at Google+ and its clever little circles right now and weighing up the implications. And that's after she’s tracked the latest mobile innovations, revisited Flipboard now all the hype has died down, and dispatched one of her minions to explore the yawning chasm where ‘UK local news’ should be.

So while we should all be welcome a mainstream, bi-partisan, paperless paper that champions citizen journalism and constructs its news agenda in real time based on social reaction, it’s also certain that the Huffington Post is going to have to do more than add a Union Jack gif to its masthead if it’s going to remain relevant over the next twelve months.