• FT.com, Monday, November 21, 2005 11:03 AM

Through a series of recent deals, many popular Web logs are becoming available to larger audiences. Just last week, Yahoo! announced a deal that will bring the pop culture critiquing/celebrity stalking content of Gawker Media to its pages, while Time.com said it will publish selected items from accredited journalist Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. In another deal, America Online purchased Weblogs, a blog network of 85 sites covering topics from travel to parenting, for $25 million last month. The irony in all this is that many bloggers turned to producing their own content out of discontent with mainstream media, but now it seems as though the cycle of commercialization is once again coming full circle. Big-time blogs are businesses supported by advertising, which means they're always looking to grow their audiences and attract more ad dollars. Significantly, for news junkies, many of these blogs, which often scour news sites looking for content on specific topics, have become required reading, picking up the pieces of stories from other sites these consumers may have missed.

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