Nick Denton of Gawker Media - that most gossipy and commercial of blog networks - has announced that he’s “battoning down” and putting two titles up for sale. Sploid and Screenhead (I can’t say I’m a reader of either of them) are to go.

Among the reasons Denton cites for needing to tighten ship are that he now pays wages along similar lines to mainstream media. The expansion of internet media is inflating costs. It’s increasingly hard to attract attention for new sites.

Perhaps his deadly rival, Jason Calacanis had the timing right when he sold his network to AOL last year. Denton said then that he was “way too early.”

Life has an inevitable circular quality. Young businesses mature and become rather like the old ones. But the commercial blog networks always were similar to mainstream publications, with journalistic staff and advertising relationships based on circulation figures and audience demographics. The differentiating factor was that they were easy and cheap to set up, where media launches in the past were expensive and complicated.

Real blogs are a much more individual things, and they aren’t just about building up audience share, they are more about reaching niche audiences, and perhaps more importantly about networking, collaboration, and making the world a smaller but better place. You find common interests and meet people through blogs whom you would never have met before. Which leads me to the fact that blogging has brought me far from Paddington this week, to Seattle to meet a client. I hope to be able to write more about this later.