“We are just a small little company that has gone through some challenging times that is trying to find a way to come up with ideas that will connect with an audience,” he said, smiling, when I bumped into him on a tour of the office.

Mr. Armstrong doesn’t think it’s important that customers of Black Voices, BloggingStocks or Stylelist need to know it was all brought to you by AOL.

“I am not sure that is important to the audience that Disney owns ABC or ESPN, so in the same way, FanHouse, our sports site, will live or die on its connection to the audience,” he said. “We can light a fuse, but whether or not it comes to fruition is reliant on the content.”

It is not unlike how all the major brewers responded to the influx of microbrews. They simply brewed up their own small-label brands or bought existing ones, and kept their own brand in very tiny print deep in the label where most beer drinkers can’t be bothered to look. Nick Denton, who has had some success at Gawker Media on a smaller scale with federated blogs, said it makes sense for AOL to minimize its imprimatur.

“If the sites are to seem authentic, they can’t be so obviously the product of an unimaginative conglomerate,” he said in an instant message. “That said, they didn’t do themselves any favors with some of the names. Politics Daily? Snore.”

Of course, as many newspapers have found out, you can’t create a blogger simply by having someone from mainstream media work in their pajamas. But building from its purchase of Weblogs from Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey in 2005, AOL has managed to develop a number of sites with rabid fans and traffic that comes from all corners, not just the portal.

“Advertisers want reach, engagement and scale, and we want this to work,” said Rob Norman, chief executive of GroupM Interaction, a unit of ad giant WPP. He said that in spite of the many fizzled efforts to remake AOL, “you now have leadership in place who has a clear understanding of the economics and strategies for creating great content.”