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The Huffington Post has confirmed tonight that it has been acquired by AOL. According to a report by Kara Swisher, site-cofounder Arianna Huffington will become Editor in Chief of all AOL content.

That's an incredibly bold move and a big bet of AOL's remaining revenue streams on the future of content on the web. It's hard to imagine a better bet in that direction. Huffington has demonstrated a clear ability to win at the bulk and low-cost content game. Somewhere in the discussion, the lawsuit about the Post's founding has got to be pondered. The best place to watch discussion of this news will probably be media industry aggregator Mediagazer. Some questions I've got, below.

Five years ago this week I began writing for AOL's blog network Weblogs Inc. I wrote 5 technology news stories each day and was paid a mere $5 per article. It was grueling, that was just one of 3 jobs I had at the time - and it was great.

AOL's secret internal plan to ramp up its online content business was leaked today to New York business blog Business Insider and people are saying it's got "content farm" written all over it. In-house writers are expected to write 5 to 10 blog posts per day and those stories are expected to go from an average of 1500 pageviews per post today to an amazing 7000 views per post in the future. How will stories be selected? The only thing that will matter, apparently, is search engine friendliness and monetization potential. That might sound terrible to outsiders, but having been there I want to say: Good luck AOL, I hope that strategy works wonderfully for you. I genuinely do.

The guys at About.me say they considered a number of different URLs for their company. That they chose the name About.me seemed to pay off today when it was announced that the four-month old company, lead by some of Silicon Valley's best known startup people, has become AOL's latest acquisition.

With the startup acquisitions piling up in just the past couple of years, including About.me, 5Min, ThingLabs, SocialThing and TechCrunch, it looks like AOL is trying to take a shot at what Yahoo! is now admitting it failed at: amassing hot little startups and the brains behind them to try to form a cohesive whole. But what did AOL get in its acquisition of About.me?

The latest comScore Top 50 Properties (U.S.) statistics make sobering reading for AOL, the former king of the portals in the 90s and early part of this century. While AOL is the number 5 ranked U.S. web property, with 104 million monthly unique visitors, it's now well adrift of the top 4: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook is just one spot above AOL, but has nearly 44 million more monthly uniques. Meanwhile a company that is virtually an unknown brand outside of the Internet industry, Glam Media, has just about caught up with AOL.

Glam Media had 91 million uniques in September, according to comScore. That's only 13 million less than AOL. Glam Media had 54 million uniques one year ago, so how has it managed to get to within sniffing distance of becoming one of the top 5 Web properties in the U.S.?

Thing Labs, the company behind social media stream reader Brizzly, has been acquired by AOL, multiple sources have now confirmed. The startup is led by Jason Shellen, who managed the creation of the category-killing Google Reader years ago, and Ben Darnell, who was a key engineer in creating Reader.

It was just one of three major acquisitions by AOL announced today, including video site 5 Mins and of course market-leading tech blog TechCrunch. AOL has long been the home of some of the most popular social products (AIM) and destinations (Engadget) online. The addition of the expert stream team from Thing Labs is a bold move that will help the big media company compete in the era of Facebook and the News Feed.

Google and AOL just announced that they have renewed their global search alliance for another five years. Google will continue to power search on all of AOLs properties. For the most part, the new agreement just reinforces the existing contract, but the two companies also plan to expand their current alliance to cover mobile search and AOLs videos will now be syndicated on YouTube. According to the latest data from Web analytics firm comScore, AOL currently accounts for 2.3% of the search market in the U.S.

AOL's MapQuest announced today that it is launching an open-source mapping initiative, beginning with the U.K. and then heading to the United States. The project, available now at open.mapquest.co.uk, uses the new modern design and layout for MapQuest revealed last week in beta format. However, the data on the site comes from the OpenStreetMap community, an ongoing effort to create free and editable maps worldwide.

Along with the launch of "MapQuest Open," as the project is called, AOL also announced a $1 million OpenStreetMap investment fund to support the growth of open-source mapping in the U.S. "MapQuest is the first large-scale mapping site to embrace the open-source community," said Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures, Local and Mapping.

Yahoo announced today that it is buying Associated Content, a user-generated media company with 380,000 contributors and 16 million monthly visitors.

Yahoo, the second largest search engine after Google, said it will complete this acquisition in the third quarter of 2010. Although financial terms were not released by either company, the deal is thought to be worth in the area of $90-100 million.

Once upon a time, ICQ was synonymous with instant messaging. While ICQ doesn't have this kind of clout anymore, it is still very popular in Russia and other countries that use the Cyrillic alphabet. AOL bought ICQ in 1998 for $287 million, but the company has been trying to sell ICQ for quite a while. After a short bidding war between China's Tencent and Russia's Digital Sky Technologies and ProfMedia, AOL just announced that it has sold ICQ to Digital Sky Technologies (DST) for $187.5 million.

As we profiled in our Never Mind the Valley series last month, New York is increasing its stronghold on the east coast startup scene. The city's rich media and international business ecosystems make it the perfect launch pad for startups looking to leverage these markets. One other reason the city has seen successful growth of entrepreneurship is the holding company Betaworks, which shows no signs of slowing after raising $20 million from Intel, AOL, RRE Ventures and several others.