• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 7, 2005

America Online's decision to purchase Weblogs for $25 million is the latest example of the if-you-can't-beat-em-join-em attitude that, these days, established media companies exhibit toward consumer-generated sites.

Last week, News Corp. spent $580 million to purchase Intermix Media, owner of social networking property MySpace.com. Earlier this year, Yahoo! started hosting Arianna Huffington's HuffingtonPost. Even the Washington Post got into the act, recently adding a one-week guest blog by conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan.

It's obvious that the newfound interest in blogs is fueled by the strong online ad market, which has given companies an incentive to keep users on their sites for as long as possible, even if that means making deals with lots of small niche sites.

These moves also suggest that the dichotomy between mainstream media ands user-generated content is breaking down. Perhaps the large corporate media companies are no longer as wary as in the past of giving citizen journalists and other consumers a platform.

Still, it's not clear that blogs and other consumer-generated sites will retain their character when they're no longer independent, but instead part of the media machine they once spurned.