Buzz

The internet is now mainstream!

Have you noticed that the websites that we all know and love are being bought up by “the man” at an alarming rate lately?  Yesterday, AOL announced that it was buying Weblogs, the parent company of the popular tech blog Engadget.  This year News Corp (they’re the ones that invented “Fair and Balanced” journalism) has spent close to (insert Doctor evil voice) $1 billion buying websites like Myspace.com and GameSpy.com.  Some of these websites, like GameSpy.com, have been around for as long as I can remember (and everything before 1998 is a blur!).  I guess this is proof that the interweb has finally become mainstream.  What I’m hoping is that “the man” doesn’t take a great idea and ruin it.  Take for example “the little instant messanger that could”, ICQ.  I had an ICQ account (7 digits!!) before AIM simply because none of my friends used AOL’s messanger.  AOL bought ICQ and locked it in the dungeon, never to be seen again.  This allowed their IM subscriptions to skyrocket.  Will the same happen this time around?  Will AOL and NewsCorp degrade the quality of sites like Engadget and GameSpy simply to push users to their lame web portals?  I’m not a big fan of all things mainstream so of course I’m highly skeptical.  Only time will tell....

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