AOL Buys Huffington Post for How Much?

Nothing can revive the Rip Van Winkle of bloggers (yours truly) faster than the news of a $315 million purchase price for a blog. Mostly a blog aggregator at that. Sure, AOL's $315 million announcement to acquire the Huffington Post would be a much bigger deal if it weren't AOL doing the math on the financials, but still, pretty big news for aspiring bloggers everywhere. AOL has a history of pumped up acquisitions that wind up being worse investments than even the doubters initially imagined. Nevertheless, Tim Armstrong, AOL's fearless Chairman and CEO, has maintained his enthusiasm that maybe, just maybe, someday, one of these deals is going to turn into something other than a really nice tax write-off. "When people think about Google for search and Amazon for commerce, I think they're going to end up thinking about AOL for content" the FT quoth Mr. Armstrong. Ah, content. That's what he's going for. Identifying AOL with content. Instead of say, really slow dialup internet service, chat rooms, and enormously expensive acquisitions, which is what AOL is currently associated with. In any event, this time, for obvious reasons, I hope Mr. Armstrong hits the big time.