A conference call about the buy-out is kicking off in just minutes. I'll be liveblogging it here on the jump. Stay tuned.

OK, it's now underway.

EA says they've had their eye on these companies for a number of years and that the two companies will help fill a void in EA's RPG, action and adventure games. They also will get to dip their toe into the MMO world.

Now the deal specifics:

They are paying $860 million in consideration, as we reported earlier, and they expect the deal to close by early 2008.

EA expects to break even on the deal by 2009 and start raking it in by 2010.

John Riccitiello's on the line now. He says he has a "residual interest" in Elevation Partners but that the decision to go ahead with the purchase was confirmed by an independent team.

Frank Gibeau, president of the games label, said EA expects games to be created in "10 plus" franchises as well as the MMO that Bioware's Austin office is working on.

Of the ten plus franchises there are many titles that have not yet been announced but will be in the near future. They do include Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Mercenaries, Saboteur, Neverwinter Knights and several others.

EA said Bioware and Pandemic have several titles that have been targeted for the DS and the Wii.

The dialog engine in Mass Effect which could be used for other games in the future.

EA brings a lot to the table in the deal, Riccitiello says. They can "offer them the leverage of the world's best publisher", much more in the way of online and much more in the way of mobile.

"We are not in the open world action adventure business, these guys are leaders. Strong intellectual properties and talent."

Of the ten titles that the EA folks referenced earlier, the games are expected to be spread out from now to 2011.

EA is already publishing a bulk of Bioware and Pandemic titles, so the effect of the titles hitting this holiday probably won't be that pronounced.

Riccitiello compares today's news with EA's aquisition of Maxis or Westwood, though he points out both were smaller developers than BioWare or Pandemic.

Maxis has since become a much bigger, bigger business. In the case of Westwood, EA was less successful there but they were able to take the C&C franchise and build it significantly.

And that's it. I'll be posting the full transcript of this call down here once it hits the EA webpage. I'd expect it to be within the next hour.

2:13: The topic: What Digg's learned over the past two years and what happens behind the scenes. (This is where we learn it's just a monkey drinking Heineken.) Calls Rumsfeld "Rumsfield." Notes that the story about Rumsfeld stepping down hit the front page of Digg in 5 minutes after the first published announcement, Reddit in 3, Google News in 25 minutes.

Most of the users who glommed onto this story early, found it on Digg's Swarm and Stack tools.

2:17: Digg is also working on giving these tools to web publishers, giving dugg writers info about who's digging their story, what's going on. Digg's building a flash toolkit for this.

Gaming Digg
Kevin: Users are trying to game Digg — groups like Spike the Vote. But they don't know what Digg is doing behind the scenes to stop this. Digg looked at patterns, watching stories as they were being dugg. He shows graphs of diggs over time.

"We can get an idea of a healthy digging pattern over time." Are they being dugg from upcoming pages? Are they being dugg by people referred from other sites? "If a lot of diggs have no referrer, we can tell someone's trying to game Digg."

Another graph shows some stories with strange activity, which stand out from a dark pattern formed by the many similarly dugg stories. Same-source digging, high percentage of anonymous proxies — these are signs of fake diggs.

2:22: Digg is starting to create profiles. First, it shows users who are good or bad diggers. Second, it'll help Diggers socialize. "There are users that we internally call prescient submitters...they have a knack for what is cool and what will become popular." These are not the top diggers.

Kevin shows a flash module — "This is dumb so we won't launch this" — like the Digg swarm feature, but with bees buzzing toward flowers. Looks cute, but easy to see how it's basically a skimmed swarm.