WebProNews

At today's WeMedia event Rafat Ali whispered to me to hit his blog at 8 p.m. for a big scoop and boy was he right.

PaidContent.org (ahem - source them please CNET!) is reporting that Weblogs Inc. has been sold to America Online. The blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, is being bought by AOL for as much as $35M, paidContent.org has learned from multiple sources. Rafat, who used to work for Calacanis in their prior lives, says the deal is done and should be announced this week.

Rafat notes that this is perhaps the first pure content-related company being bought out in the blog/Web 2.0 space and that for AOL, this is a head first move into blog media. During my panel today at We Media I noted that the line is blurring between big blog media - e.g. Weblogs Inc. and Gawker Media - and just plain ol' big media. This deal is a sure sign this is indeed true. Soon it will all simply be viewed as media - whether it's citizen, professional or a hybrid car.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.