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At the end of 2008, it was announced that Consumers Union, publishers of Consumer Reports was acquiring Consumerist.com from Nick Denton's Gawker Media. Gawker has now dropped its Defamer.com site as its own entity and rolled it into Gawker.com as the site's "column from Hollywood."

Defamer's writers are moving on, and the column is being taken over by Gawker's Richard Lawson and a yet to be hired reporter, while being supervised by managing editor Gabriel Snyder. Denton announced the changes yesterday afternoon, just in time to get it switched over before the Oscars (of which there is plenty of coverage of on Defamer).

"Gawker now draws more than 3m visitors a month — four times the audience it had in 2007," writes Denton on his blog. "More than three-quarters of Gawker's readership is from outside New York. The inclusion of Defamer's Hollywood gossip — following an expansion of political coverage last year and the incorporation of Valleywag — reflects Gawker's evolution into a national gossip site."

Denton told the Wall Street Journal that he is hoping to get a nice boost to Gawker's traffic by rolling Defamer into the site, just as he did with Valleywag last year. If nothing else, the timing was a good choice for the move - the biggest Hollywood gossip day of the year.

Speaking of the Oscars, YouTube and Google Book Search are both highlighting Academy Award content. You can see parodies and books that some of the films were adapted from.