Ouch. Well, then the weblogs.com servers will probably get Septembered 1, just like Usenet did back then. In any case, what will likely cause problems is the infrastructure of information services. If a significant number of weblogs are created via AOL (and you can bet that the AOL weblogs will really be diaries and will be hard to beat in quantity and easy to beat in quality
), how will services like Technorati, Feedster, blo.gs and similar handle it? So we can be curious to see how the blogging infrastructure will cope with something like this and what happens to it (certainly a few hardware upgrades will be necessary). I can well imagine that one or another service will give up the ghost, especially if the AOL weblogs are cranking out pings. Possibly AOL will set up its own server this time, which would at least be sensible, and distribute the pings via changes.xml to the other services.
Unlike Usenet, the blogosphere is not a push medium, so it shouldn't make any difference to the end user (unlike Usenet, where every participant had to experience the chaos). Except that there will be even more weblogs and probably the various weblog search services, information services and directories will have to think about how to structure their information - otherwise you won't find anything in all that mess. [1] the invasion of millions of AOL users into Usenet took place in September 1993.
At Der Schockwellenreiter you can find the original article.