What is the Huffington Post today? As I noted in , it's become the Wal-Mart of Web news --- you'll find the pork rinds next to the shotgun pellets and behind the lawn chairs.

What happened? Money happened. Ad dollars started rolling in, but only to a point. Arianna & Co. quickly realized the only way to boost ad revenue was to dramatically increase the volume of posts appearing on the site, and the only way to do that was to hire newbies and have them crank out high-speed rehashes of everything everyone else was reporting, with an emphasis on Google-friendly photo slideshows and celebrity gossip. Sure, the celebutantes and reporters were still there, blogging away for free, but their voices were drowned out by the cacophony.

Arianna was simply following the old dot-com mantra of Get Big Quick. Become the big fish that the little fish are afraid of. She's hardly the only one.

When first appeared, it consisted of one dyspeptic ex-lawyer giving his candid opinions on Silicon Valley startups. It was something we hadn't seen before --- an inside look at how deals are evaluated and made --- and it attracted a lot of attention and advertising revenue, despite .

But how many blog posts can one man write in a day? To boost revenue, TechCrunch staffed up and became a tech news/rumor/innuendo site. Though it is still the first place VCers go to spill the beans about upcoming deals (most likely to benefit themselves and/or harm others), it too became another place where you could read about what other people were reporting without having to open a new browser tab.