Centripetal Forces of New Media

You may or may not have heard that Huffington Post is being purchased by AOL. This is certainly good news for Arianna Huffington, both with respect to her political influence and her bank account (isn't she loaded already?). There is also some possibility that it will create additional left-leaning ballast in the national media - although it seemed to me that HuffPost was doing pretty well all on its own. My biggest problem with the acquisition is that it represents yet another step in the concentration of media into fewer and fewer hands. The internet started out as a fairly open system, amenable to a range of new voices, yet over time virtually every significant voice has been absorbed into a larger institutional framework. A few of these are still independent - like Daily Kos and Firedoglake - but most seem to have been scooped up by more established media players. Perhaps this is inevitable, but I must admit a pang at seeing the gradual death of the freewheeling blogosphere of 2004. My goodness, has it already been seven years?

(edit: that's what I get for not looking up how to spell "centripetal" first)