Blogger strikes gold

Weblogs Inc., the collection of 85 blogs and about fifteen full-time employees started two years ago by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, has been bought by AOL, PaidContent.org reported last night. Details filtering out today suggest the deal is for $25 million, perhaps more. Weblogs publishes Engadget, Autoblog and BloggingBaby, among others, and collectively counts 30 million-plus monthly page views and 25 million RSS views. The blogs will remain independent of AOL's content, but someone at PaidContent observes: "The dot-boom ended when AOL bought Time-Warner. ... Will the blogging boom also end with an AOL purchase?" Here's the press release.