God knows how many times I’ve blogged about (a) the future of the Net NOT being 8 billion bloggers, and (b) why the Threebies – Big Barbarian Beasts – will take over in order to make it censorious and give it an agenda.
But the evidence is all around us that the process is accelerating at an alarming rate.
Ian Dale has gone. Anna Raccoon has retired hurt. Guido gets the odd great scoop, but on the whole he’s become an online media-buying house, and doyen of the hard, vaguely anarchic Right. And as the blogging fad reaches its nadir, so too the control-freaks (sporting grey suits, thick necks and bizarre bigotry) are buying their way in.
Newsweek has bagged The Daily Beast, and – infamously – Arianna Huffington has sold out (in every sense) to the weird AOL cult. Huffpost was one of the last bastions of eclectic opinion and open-minded comment-thread management. Now – as The Slog discovered quite quickly – threaders either toe the Party line, or get banned.
Equally shameful is the decision by Steve Jobs to do a tablet deal with Newscorp, an arrangement that will see Rupert Murdoch’s News online portal getting massive access to all kinds of lucrative niches.
You only have to read the output of The Sun and the New York Daily Post to grasp what an infestation of paid-for Murbollochs Newscorp online will be…..if it survives the UK Hackgate scandal, which I increasingly doubt...read more
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/a-free-independent-internet-its-disappearing-fast-but-there-are-a-thousand-reasons-why-it-mustnt/
