America Online Inc (AOL), the US-based global Internet services and media company is planning to add another reputed blog to its stable by opening talks to buy technology blog TechCrunch.

Citing a person familiar with the devfelopment, The Wall Street Journal today reported on a possible deal but could not confirm the terms and status of the transaction.

AOL and TechCrunch had discussed a merger a few years ago, but since nothing come out of it, the Journal said that there is no guarantee a deal could materialize this time.

According a report by GigaOm, a Web 2.0 blog started by Om Malik, which also reported on the possible merger of AOL and TechCrunch, the deal is likely to be announced at TechCrunch's flagship Conference Disrupt currently underway in San Francisco.

TechCrunch is a widely respected technology blog operating from Silicon Valley and offers technology news and analysis, as well as profiles start-up companies, products and websites.

It was founded in 2005 by serial entrepreneur and lawyer Micheal Arrington and the blog has gained a reputation of breaking news in the technology sector.

Within a year of being launched, TechCrunch came into the limelight when it first broke the news of Google's acquisition of YouTube in 2006.

Two years later, Arrington was named as one of the World's 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine.

Apart from TechCrunch, the company has several other tech sites, commonly referred to as The TechCrunch Network, which includes sites dedicated to mobile computing, gadgets and computer hardware. In March 2010, TechCrunch announced it would be launching TechCrunch TV.

TechCrunch says it has some 9.2 million visitors a month and annual income of $10 million.

New York-based Internet pioneer AOL, which went in for the audacious $164.75-billion merger with Time Warner in 2001 and had to return to its web roots in 2009 following a demerger, already owns a portfolio of blogs including the respected Engadget, a rival of TechCrunch, which it had acquired in 2005.

In 2001, when AOL, then a rapidly growing internet service provider, acquired Time Warner during the height of the dot-com era venture valuations for $164 billion, the deal was hailed as a model for the future of media operations, but the alliance soon began to crumble along with the burst of the dot-com bubble in 2002 and AOL's valuation plunged forcing AOL Time Warner to report a loss of $99 billion.

The $99-billion loss was at the time the largest ever reported by a company in the US, and was only marginally behind AIG's loss of $99.29 billion in 2008. The whopping loss made Time Warner drop AOL from its corporate name.

Since the costly separation, AOL has been struggling and has seen its revenues shrink from $4 billion in 2008 to $3.1 billion last year.

Early this year, the company under Tim Amstrong began cutting more than 1,000 jobs in the US and Europe after a voluntary departure programme to reduce a third of its staff 6,900 companywide workforce attracted only 1,100 employees.