I love the smell of blog wars in the morning!

Acting as Facebook often does to Google, a new site started by former Engadget editor Josh Topolsky just hired away yet another passel of tech journalists from the giant gadget news and reviews organization.

Editorial movement is not uncommon on tech news sites, but this level of it from one site to another is somewhat, um, aggressive.

Engadget, which is owned by AOL, is one of the largest tech-focused sites on the Web. Topolsky left his editor-in-chief job there in March.

By April, he had grabbed eight prominent Engadget staffers who had left the huge tech site amid editorial tensions, in order to start a new competing gadget property for the well-funded sports content start-up SB Nation.

Now, sources said, Topolsky has added Thomas Ricker, an Engadget senior editor, who had run its European coverage; Sean Hollister, a senior associate editor, who ran its West coast team; and Joseph Flatley, an associate editor.

Also hired: Thomas Houston, editor-in-chief of Switched, an AOL tech site that was recently subsumed into its Huffington Post Media unit; and Dieter Bohn, who was editor-in-chief for the Smartphone Experts network of sites, including Crackberry and others.

And other possible new hires soon from Engadget: Another European editor, Vlad Savov, and writer Jacob Schulman.

The Topolsky-helmed site is still unnamed but is now operating as This Is My Next. It already has 16 writers, compared to Engadget’s two dozen, and is set to debut in the fall with a new name.

It will be the first content expansion at the Washington, D.C., SB Nation, which completed a $10.5 million Series C round, led by Khosla Ventures, in the fall.

Before that, SB Nation had already raised about $13 million in total venture funding from Accel Partners, Allen & Company and Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as from angel investors such as Ted Leonsis and others in Silicon Valley.

Another AOL link: SB Nation was founded by former AOLer, CEO Jim Bankoff, who had bought Engadget for AOL many years ago.

Engadget Editorial Director Josh Frulinger said that the impact of the talent drain on Engadget — mostly from This Is My Next raids — has been small, since the site has also been aggressively hiring.

“We’re past the people leaving and into celebrating what we’ve accomplished in six short months, and we welcome any new competition,” he said. “Dana Wollman, Brian Heater, Myriam Joire, Zach Honig, Joe Pollicino, Richard Lawler, Michael Gorman, Sean Buckley, Joseph Volpe, Brad Molen, Terrence O’Brien, Amar Toor and Sharif Skar — all brought on in the past six months — are your Engadget stars of tomorrow.”

To prove it, AOL said unique visitors for Engadget in June were up 1.1 percent from May and will be up again for July. In recent reports, the site had 14 million unique monthly visitors.

AOL will begin rolling out its plans to overhaul its panoply of content sites as early as today, a key part of its integration with the Huffington Post, sources familiar with the situation said.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong will be sending out an internal memo on the topic soon, said sources with knowledge of the moves.

He will outline how the New York-based Internet portal, which paid $315 million to acquire the high-profile news and opinion site, will essentially close down dozens of its dedicated content sites–some being shuttered completely and others integrated with existing Huffington Post sites.

One example of the first is Politics Daily, as has been previously reported; it will no longer exist as a brand. Its staff is being integrated into the Huffington Post’s more robust political offerings.

It goes both ways, though–the Huffington Post’s travel site will be closed in favor of AOL’s stronger offering in that arena.

And still other well-known AOL brands, such as its PopEater celebrity site and its StyleList fashion and beauty site, will keep their names but no longer exist as separate destination sites. PopEater will be integrated into HuffPo’s entertainment and StyleList to its similar site.

[UPDATE: StyleList's status was shifted just this morning--it will remain a standalone brand and AOL's Shelterpop will become StyleList at Home, integrating into StyleList. Plus it will all now be called Stylist--losing the "e" and capped "L."]

The changes are causing some tension within AOL, given it is a drastic shift from relatively recent efforts to expand its portfolio of editorial sites.

In fact, some insiders are calling the recent vetting of which content sites to close and which to keep as “death panels,” a somewhat dicey reference to controversies over the Obama administration’s healthcare plan.

Also on deck for tomorrow will be letters sent out to freelancers about new plans to hire some–though not all–of them. According to several sources, AOL content head Arianna Huffington outlined the plan to editors recently, stressing the need to focus on staff-generated and more journalistically focused content.

One thing that is not happening is the appointment of a new editor-in-chief for AOL’s flagship tech news site, Engadget.

BoomTown reported on the recent departure of Engadget’s top two editors, Editor-in-Chief Josh Topolsky and Managing Editor Nilay Patel.

The news rocketed around the small echo chamber that is the tech blogosphere, which is no surprise since Engadget is one of the largest sites on the Web covering the tech sector.

In the interim, staffer Darren Murph has been appointed managing editor of Engadget. He reports to Joshua Fruhlinger, editorial director for Engadget, Switched and AOL Tech. Brad Hill is the business director for the properties.

Engadget is one of the largest in tech, with 14 million unique visitors a month. Its main competitor is Gawker’s Gizmodo. AOL also owns TechCrunch, another tech news site.

An email to AOL for comment has not yet been returned.

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: