AOL celebrates the third anniversary of its acquisition of Weblogs, Inc. this month. In 2005, Weblogs had a large portfolio of niche blogs targeted at business and professional users, in addition to a general readership. Since then, Weblogs has honed its portfolio to 29 blogs focused on major consumer passion points such as technology, autos, finance, video games and travel. Since 2005, Weblogs has seen worldwide unique visitors climb nearly 1,000% (122% annually, on average) and page views rise over 1,500% (154% annually, on average), according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix.

In addition to Weblogs' own growth, the acquisition was instrumental to AOL's launch of successful sites such as TMZ, http://tmz.com, and Asylum, http://asylum.com, FanHouse, http://fanhouse.com, BloggingStocks, http://bloggingstocks.com, and Spinner, http://spinner.com. AOL is now the largest global publisher of owned-and-operated blogs.

"The acquisition of Weblogs was game-changing for AOL and the entire blogging community," said Marty Moe, Senior Vice President, AOL Money & Finance, News, Sports, Weblogs and KOL. "Weblogs pioneered the development of professional blogging, and AOL accelerated its growth and leadership in branded content publishing by deeply integrating Weblogs throughout AOL's substantial network of programming channels. In doing so, AOL transformed its publishing model and increased its relevancy and reach for advertisers, while advancing best-of-breed sites in key consumer interest areas."

AOL's owned and operated blog network, including Weblogs, Inc. and AOL's other blog properties, is now the largest in the world in terms of unique visitors, according to August 2008 comScore Media Metrix, with a worldwide blog audience of more than 30 million unique visitors and more than 650 million page views monthly. Leading brands in AOL's blog network include TMZ, http://tmz.com, Engadget, http://engadget.com, Asylum, http://asylum.com, FanHouse, http://fanhouse.com, Autoblog, http://autoblog.com, Spinner, http://spinner.com, Joystiq, http://joystiq.com, BloggingStocks, http://bloggingstocks.com, ParentDish, http://parentdish.com, Cinematical, http://cinematical.com, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), http://tuaw.com, DownloadSquad, http://downloadsquad.com, GreenDaily, http://greendaily.com, Luxist, http://luxist.com, and others.

Over the next 12 months, AOL plans to launch of number of new blog brands in important consumer interest areas, as well as aggressively continue the expansion of its blogs internationally.

After letting them gestate in beta for a while, AOL has formally launched two new "lifestyle" sites: entertainment blog PopEater and quirky women's lifestyle title Lemondrop. They're the latest in a series of original blogs that AOL has rolled out, from men's site Asylum to Web meme blog Urlesque, adding to the titles it absorbed when it acquired the Weblogs Inc. network.

Lemondrop is cute, fluffier than Jezebel but a little bit edgier than anything you'd see in the squeaky-clean Sugar Inc. blog network. When I loaded it up, the top story was a rant called "I Miss Making Out," and further down was a gallery of sexy fictional murderers in conjunction with the recent news that the slasher flick American Psycho will be adapted into a stage musical.

As for PopEater, AOL already owns a phenomenally successful entertainment site, TMZ.com, so a new one may look a bit redundant. PopEater, however, looks like it's more Entertainment Weekly than Us Weekly, focused more on how the fall TV season's faring than which celebrity is staggering drunk out of which West Hollywood nigthclub.

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL's launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will acquire Bebo for $850 million in cash.

"Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media," said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. "What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers."

"AOL understands the shifting dynamics of the Web and has clearly demonstrated its commitment to leveraging the ever-increasing power of social networks," said Bebo President, Joanna Shields. "With one and the same vision in this area, it was a natural progression for Bebo to join AOL, and we look forward to working together to continue to expand the online social experience globally."

As for the rest of the field, AOL's purchase of Bebo is likely to set off a round of consolidation among smaller players that would be fine tuck-in deals in a larger setting.

With Bebo off the table sites like Ning and LinkedIn have just become more valuable-especially to a company like Yahoo, which appears to be left out of the social networking party.

FeedBurner will be working with AOL to manage hundreds of the company's RSS, podcast and video feeds consisting of news, sports and entertainment content. Additionally, all Time Warner properties including HBO, New Line Cinema, Time Inc. and Warner Bros. Entertainment can take advantage of FeedBurner's services. We like open floodgates around here, so long as the servers stay dry.

We'll be providing AOL with detailed analytics about how its content is consumed beyond the AOL Web site -- such as within widgets, in feed readers and on blogs -- to help them accurately measure influence wherever their content is consumed.

So, what next? My guess: a rapid re-entry, with a well-funded venture in internet media, probably podcasting or wiki directories, judging by the topics Calacanis covers in his personal writing. He'll be loud, infuriating -- and probably, irritatingly, successful.

In recent months, Mr. Calacanis said he was considering leaving AOL to start a new company. His decision to resign was hastened by the news that Time Warner, AOL's parent, had replaced Mr. Miller with Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group.

"I'm not inclined to start over with a new guy," Mr. Calacanis said in an interview on Thursday. As for what to make of the treatment of Mr. Miller, who discovered he was being replaced after a reporter called AOL asking about Mr. Falco's appointment, Mr. Calacanis said only: "I'm perplexed. Why now?"

At launch, the new section, "The Stump," contains blogs by 17 political bloggers hired specifically for the venture. The bloggers represent a wide range of political ideologies; while some of them also maintain personal blogs, the content they post on AOL is exclusive to the site, said Lewis D'Vorkin, editor in chief, AOL News.

In addition, through a deal with ABC, visitors to The Stump also can ask questions of TV journalists Sam Donaldson, George Stephanopoulos, Jake Tapper and Brian Roberts. Videos of the journalists' responses will be posted each Friday beginning this week, with Donaldson.

With The Stump, AOL aims to both increase users' interaction with the site and expose more AOL users to Web logs, D'Vorkin said. "Our goal is to open up the blogging experience," he said, adding that the blogs allow for users to post unmoderated comments.

The first set of blogs--which quietly rolled out last week--are devoted to the NFL, with AOL Sports now hosting one blog for each of the 32 professional NFL teams as well as a handful of other blogs devoted to subjects like fantasy football. The new blog section, dubbed "Fanhouse," will soon add more than 40 additional blogs devoted to college football. AOL is paying all of the new bloggers for each entry they write.

The goal, says Neal Scarbrough, General Manager of AOL Sports, is to increase the amount of time users spend on AOL's sports section. "AOL wants to crank up our sports coverage as a whole," he said, adding that the company specifically wants to boost user engagement.

AOL will promote the blogs through partnerships with other online sites, including fellow Time Warner property SI.com--the Web site of Sports Illustrated magazine.

No. 4417749 conducted hundreds of searches over a three-month period on topics ranging from "numb fingers" to "60 single men" to "dog that urinates on everything."

And search by search, click by click, the identity of AOL user No. 4417749 became easier to discern. There are queries for "landscapers in Lilburn, Ga," several people with the last name Arnold and "homes sold in shadow lake subdivision gwinnett county georgia."

It did not take much investigating to follow that data trail to Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow who lives in Lilburn, Ga., frequently researches her friends’ medical ailments and loves her three dogs. "Those are my searches," she said, after a reporter read part of the list to her.

AOL removed the search data from its site over the weekend and apologized for its release, saying it was an unauthorized move by a team that had hoped it would benefit academic researchers.

But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data.

"This was a screw up, and we're angry and upset about it," Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman said. "It was an innocent-enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant."

It's a really simple, clean-looking implementation that feels very solid and exposes the right level of functionality up front.

Tom is the only default contact that you have when you first install the client. There is a prominent "Add your friends to IM" link on the client that takes you to a page that lets you add your MySpace friends to IM with one click.

The client retains your chat history (as you can see in the below chat with Tom), and has a big ol' box that sets your away message.

The only bug I noticed was that my MySpace image doesn't show up, likely because it's a gif. They're working on that, though.

I just heard a rumor that AOL is going to challenge MySpace, "head on," to be announced in approximately two weeks.

A few people have asked me why I'm not using the AOL Journals product for this blog. I love AOL Journals, and there are several of them that I check regularly, but the simple answer is that my tech guys told me that we needed to use a different platform in order to do the things I want to do with this blog. Beyond RSS feeds, we're kicking around a few other ideas that will be rolling out in the next few weeks and months. Stay tuned!

It won't be a site per se. Rather, the online giant is building a platform off its massively popular AOL Instant Messenger service to better enable its users to share and create content. That the internal shorthand for the project is "AIMspace" -- don't count on that being its real name -- testifies to how tightly the company plans to tie it to AIM, which the company says has 43 million users. (What is an IMer's "buddy list" if not a social network?) It also shows how MySpace has become the generic term for all social networking sites, which were the dark-horse mass media success story of 2005.

Eye-popping traffic numbers rung up by MySpace, facebook.com, and xanga.com, and those brands' meteoric rise, make it easy to forget just how devalued the phrase "Web community" once was. Not that long ago it was linked to flameouts and never-weres such as TheGlobe.com and Geocities. Back then, the notion of reader-produced content was, often correctly, interpreted as "we are too cheap to pay for it." That millions of consumers, and especially young ones, now find online pals' content -- be it photos, messages, or random musings -- more compelling than that of quote-unquote professionals is one of the bitterest pills Big Media has had to swallow of late.