Yesterday, BoomTown was hanging in Hollywood at ContentNext’s EconCeleb’s conference, where I did an onstage interview with legendary editor Bonnie Fuller about the massive impact of the Internet on celebrity journalism.

With its instant ability to deliver news, video and more, sites like TMZ, PerezHilton, The Superficial and Yahoo’s (YHOO) omg! have become massive drivers of traffic on the Internet and–despite the saturation–the arena is still growing fast, especially among women users.

But for those not in the know about Fuller’s impact on how celebrity journalism has developed to its current power, she is the reason–more than any other modern editor–humanity now knows every move made by the unholy trio of Paris, Lindsay and, most of all, Britney.

As founding editor of US Weekly (with stints at Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and other mags), and as the editorial director of the parent company of Star magazine, Fuller’s various editorial innovations–celebrities are just like us!–are now commonplace.

And like a lot of old media stars, Fuller is now working on her own new celeb-focused digital and media company, which she says is aimed at women 20 to 40 years old, plunging headlong into the Web arena.

Here’s my video interview with her in an alcove of the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, where we discuss what she is up to and where online celebrity coverage is going (Britney 24-7!):

At its EconCeleb conference in Hollywood today, ContentNext released its list of the most influential and innovative online celebrities today.

It is an interesting and varied list that includes everyone from powerhouse Oprah (pictured here, of course!) to the bisexual sprite, Tila Tequila.

The list, in ascending order:

10. Martha Stewart (she is actually a closet geek)

9. Tila Tequila (vile, but in a good way)

8. Peter Gabriel (a longtime Web pioneer in the digital music space)

7. Radiohead (innovative band pushing Web distribution boundaries)

6. Stephen Colbert (funny online and off)

5. 50 Cent (the urban rap artist as nerd)

4. Oprah Winfrey (um, she’s runs the real world and could run the Internet if she felt like it)

3. Ashton Kutcher (not just a pretty face, but one who gets the power of viral marketing)

2. Will.i.am (for that Barack Obama mashup video alone)

1. Will Ferrell, Chris Henchy & Adam McKay (FunnyOrDie.com might not make money, but it is very funny)

I have posted below a video interview with ContentNext’s founder Rafat Ali, who spoke about the deal. I caught up with him in his New York hotel this morning (by coincidence I flew into New York today on a redeye).

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

Several sources told me TechCrunch has been in off-and-on talks recently with Time Warner’s AOL (TWX), which wants to pay from $20 and $30 million for the site.

I could not find out what price TechCrunch thinks is fair, although one might assume it is higher than that.

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde told me via email that she had no comment. “My policy is not to comment on rumors of our business,” she wrote.

TechCrunch, which was founded in mid-2005 by Michael Arrington, is a group-edited blog that has grown large by focusing–”obsessively,” according to the site’s About page–on Web 2.0 start-ups, covering every jog and tittle of their life cycles.

Sources said the talks between TechCrunch and AOL have been ongoing for the past six to eight weeks, although the site has been in talks with several other large media companies interested in it in the past and these have not led to an acquisition.

AOL would probably be a good home for a site like TechCrunch, since it has a blog focus from its own Switched site and sites it bought, like Engadget.

AOL acquired that popular gadget site in 2005 in the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, which was founded by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis, by the way, runs an annual tech conference with TechCrunch, now called TechCrunch50.

Also, I have stayed in Calacanis’s house in the Brentwood (see post and video here), when I was interviewing a Disney exec onstage at a paidContent conference in Los Angeles recently.

Oh, yes, it’s a small tech blogging world after all.

But the money has suddenly become big for the sites involved in that universe too, although most still have relatively small businesses.

Nonetheless, tech bloggers have grown in number and influence, as sites–like this one–compete to break news and attract readers.

Such efforts take funding–despite the lower costs as compared with traditional media–and this probably means inevitable consolidation.

Before its acquisition by Guardian, for example, ContentNext had been raising several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

Other sites have also recently raised funds, such as GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat.

Most of them have also been talking about various roll-ups between and among one other. Sources told me that VentureBeat, for example, has spoken separately in the past to both paidContent and TechCrunch about joining forces.

VentureBeat’s Founder Matt Marshall would not comment on that, but did note that “size matters, so you have to do what you can to get the economics of scale.”

That includes adding on more sites and doing conferences, as VentureBeat has done (its new conference is called MobileBeat, for example, which will take place in Sunnyvale, Calif. on July 24.)

“Consolidation is what you are probably going to see,” predicted Marshall about the tech blogging arena.

Here’s ContentNext’s Ali talking about exactly that and more today:

In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company.

The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.

The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.

Longtime digital media exec Larry Kramer is on its board and ContentNext recently hired media exec Nathan Richardson as its CEO.

Sources said ContentNext would continue being run independently after the Guardian purchase.

This sale comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica, a much larger tech-focused site, to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million.

More to come soon.

But until then, here’s a video I did with Ali just over a year ago in a when I visited his then-new offices in Santa Monica.

While publisher and editor Ali’s got two other sites, the flagship is paidContent.org, which covers the business of digital content with a fine-tooth comb.

Ali started the site in 2002 after stints at Silicon Alley Reporter and the ill-timed Inside.com. But his entrepreneurial effort has taken off and become one of the better sites for up-to-the-minute information about the online media business.

Just this weekend, for example, Ali broke the news that Wenda Harris Millard was out as Yahoo’s ad chief (though I did predict the move–an educated guess on my part–here last week), as well as posting stories about breaking news at Dow Jones, ABC and the $8 million in funding that Digg founders just got for their new online video show site, Revision3.

ContentNext got a small amount of funding last summer from Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners and recently added longtime online exec Larry Kramer to the board. The company now has 20 employees, including the tireless executive editor Staci Kramer. It makes its revenue via advertising and now also from conferences.

So here is a video I did on my recent visit to ContentNext’s Santa Monica, Calif., digs, which they moved into in March (most of the company’s offices had previously been at Ali’s various homes), along with some observations from Ali: