I caught up with Berry this week to learn more about his experience growing HuffPost and what he's planning for his new projects. Following is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Paul Berry: We're 120 million unique visitors a month, 31-day view by Google Analytics. We're at 1.7 billion pageviews, still growing fast. To give an indicator of the velocity, at acquisition [about a year ago], we were 55 million uniques and about 700 million pageviews. So just by sheer volume of traffic and audience, those are big numbers.

The other piece is the complexity of my CMS, and sort of how wide and deep the technology is. The team that I was leading as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, I had product, design, and engineering for the Media Group. There are a bunch of domains that are powered by the technology. When I started at Huffington Post, it was metaphorically day two. We were 3 million unique visitors and 70 million pageviews a month and there were three of us in the tech team. The team that Tim Dierks takes over as the new CTO is about 220 people.

Paul Berry at Google I/O, 2009. Image by David Newman, ipadportraits.com.

And these 220 people are...

That includes a lot of designers and product and project managers. The core of Huffington Post... we had some innovations in how we would put the team together that were built out of a combination of our own character and culture and out of necessity. I was born in Mexico City, my wife is Bulgarian. International, I always knew, would mean a great deal to me. And in the last ten years and in previous jobs, I started to work out: How can you truly put together a dynamic global team? That was vital to Huffington Post.

The election year growth was driven by figuring that out. It was pretty stressful - we had no money. I couldn't just buy another server. And we had so much to accomplish. And what everyone wants from their tech team is to pull an all-nighter every single night. But you know that's not sustainable, so you know as much as you want it you can't have it. You can actually do it by playing that timezone game and passing batons. That was insanely vital to all of our growth at HuffPost. Literally HuffPost has people on every continent in every time zone. Eastern Europe and Latin America, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines.

What were some of the technical challenges you had to deal with?

Scaling was always a point of pride that we never talked about. And we never talked about security. If you're spending a lot of time talking about security, it's because you've gone through a horrible Gawker hack type of moment, and it's terrible. You do internally talk about security, and you have a security team, and you do a lot to make it happen. But at the board or ops level, if you're talking about security or scalability, you're generally suffering. It's a point of pride that that was never a big topic at ops or board meetings. We had very, very few moments of actual downtime.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter were all fairly frustrated with the media landscape - how slow media companies were to implement stuff, how slow they were to be creative and to push the envelope. And that became the roadmap pillars: Editorial efficiency and pushing the envelope with partners. A lot of the stuff that I plan to take into the incubator and into the new company is that culture of pushing those limits.

So what are these new projects?

There's two parts to it. Both, unfortunately, I have to remain a little stealth about, or I guess a lot, annoyingly. Part of my contract with AOL allowed me to work on things during this transition. So I've actually had a team working on Rebel Mouse for a while. I'm really excited about releasing some alpha and beta stuff in recent months.

Rebel Mouse is the startup company that's well defined - it has its name and its logo and it's a really well-defined concept that we're deep into. The incubator is a way to give us space to throw a lot of stuff up on the wall. It's not meant to be a 500 Startups thing, where there's a ton of companies. It's going to be much more sharing a technology stack and a social approach. And it will be social, web, and mobile that defines the companies that we end up creating. What we'll be doing is trying with a very small but elite and awesome team to take things into prototypes that start to gain real traction and go viral, and at that point, fund those into companies that we build into really big businesses.

My definition of viral is: We don't spend on marketing and ads. And that was another point of pride at Huffington Post. We never spent on SEM, it was always SEO. We never went and bought Facebook ads, we just did really well at social. These things have to have their own organic growth, where they hit this mark where you see them growing by themselves. Then you realize we have something now that we can double down on and go raise money and built that toward a big business.

Are there any specific technologies that have been particularly useful to you at HuffPost?

When I started with HuffPost about six years ago, there was still debate about whether open source would win or not. I think that has been answered. The open source stack - whichever you end up using - you have tremendous potential. It's crazy how much has been built out the last five years. The trick has really been to keep up with those sorts of things the way you keep up with a Facebook, or a Google, or a Twitter, and their product releases.

One of the surprises has been that MySQL - when Oracle bought MySQL, everyone thought it would die - and it's actually very much alive. We use Redis ("sort of a database alternative") a lot at Huffington Post, for example. There are some of these core technology stacks and open-source libraries and etc. that we'll definitely be using at the incubator.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

The OPEN Act does have some flaws, and in some points parralells SOPA, as noted by technology and law blogger Eric Goldman. Goldman notes that, like SOPA, OPEN "assumes there is a problem with foreign rogue websites that needs to be solved...and more importantly, attacking the money supply to supposed bad actors remains too blunt an instrument."

"While OPEN can't really be fixed to resolve my two structural concerns, my hope is that the discussion about OPEN will force rightsowners to provide *credible* evidence of harms that they or consumers are suffering (no more self-serving hype, please), and that such evidence will force us to think carefully about how 'rifle shot' solutions (as opposed to shotgun solutions) can ameliorate those harms," Goldman said.

Our intrepid gumshoe at Fusible.com has poked around some more, and now we have specifics about the kinds of features we can expect to see on mqVibe. It will sport tight Facebook integration, and it will combine reviews and popularity votes on neighborhoods and businesses into a "vibe score." AOL really is going to take a shot at Google Places and Yelp.

No, we didn't get an invitation. I guess we've been working too hard to blow mqVibe's cover. But denverpost.com did, and the embargo goes up early tomorrow morning.

JB at Fusible.com took some good guesses for other URLs around mqVibe and then viewed the source. By looking at the elements visible in the code, he uncovered tons of specifics about mqVibe's features. Here are the highlights he found:

• The subtitle for MQVibe is "Neighborhood Hotspots, Rankings & Reviews".
• The site will be integrated with Facebook. The Facebook page for Neighborhoodvibe will be located at: http://www.facebook.com/NeighborhoodVIBE
• You will be able to invite your Facebook friends to vote on hot neighborhoods and local hotspots and post items to your Facebook wall.
• Neighborhoods and hotspots will receive a vibe rank that you'll be able to vote up or down.
• Each place in MQVibe will be described by its vibe score and its underlying factors. These factors are based on crowd-sourced user behavior and physical characteristics of the place, such as the category and location of local businesses, density, features of the urban geography, and demographics.
• You will be able to quickly search by neighborhood or city according to a search form on the home page.
• MQVibe appears to be or is in alpha testing, according to a "Send Alpha feedback" link that appears at the top of several internal pages http://about.nvibe.com/help/report-issue/
• The Report Issue page offers some of the most telling information about the site's features (shown in the picture above). Using the Report Issue page, users can: suggest a hotspot, or correct a hotspot name or boundary; suggest adding a business that is missing; suggest a correction to the details of an existing business; report an issue with the ranking of a local business; report a business that is closed is still in the rankings; and report an issue with the neighborhood scores (Vibe Score, Walkability, Popularity, Edginess, etc.).
• Neighborhoodvibe will be the website's blog and will use WordPress as its publishing platform. The blog will be located at http://nvibe.mapquest.com/.
• The placeholder page for MQVibe online help can found at http://mqhelp.mapquest.com/mqvibe/.
A link in the footer refers to MQVibe as "Business Center".

Something Cool is Coming...

"Something cool is coming to your neighborhood," the mqVibe splash page reads. Really? Are any of the above features going to stand out? As we wrote when we confirmed mqVibe's existence, Google has a lot of these features, and they're already live and in use.

The Facebook integration could be interesting, since so many local businesses use their Facebook pages to interact with their customers, but that just makes AOL dependent on Facebook. Google is offering businesses something more tangible, though: a point of sale. Both Google Offers and AOL's Patch Deals can compete to give local customers the best deal, but AOL's hurdles to get users to adopt this service are so much higher.

What do you think? Does mqVibe have a chance? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Earlier this month, we reported on a slew of domain name purchases and trademark applications that indicated some kind of AOL social network was in the works. At the time, we figured it could have just been speculative. But no, it looks like AOL is serious. MapQuest will be the hub of AOL's effort to get on the social networking map.

The original Internet behemoth purchased NVIBE.com, NeighborhoodVibe.com and mqVibe.com this year. All of those domains point to the new "coming soon" page. AOL also registered a big portfolio of trademarks for each of these domains that indicate a location-based social networking service. Here's a selection:

Serial Number: 85419192
Online social networking services; online local and community social networking services

Serial Number: 85419185
Providing a website that enables users to connect with people in a particular neighborhood or city; Providing user-defined content and content of others selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of users

Serial Number: 85419176
Providing neighborhood and community information in the fields of education, entertainment, local events and activities, current events, shopping, arts, culture, and sports; Providing information about community and neighborhood livability

Serial Number: 85419162
Providing geographic information, destination information, interactive maps, and driving directions via computer and communications networks; Providing information, news, and commentary in the field of travel via computer and communications networks

Serial Number: 85419151
Providing information and news in the field of local business

Now that we have a hint on the MapQuest website, it looks like we can expect a map-powered social network that combines location-based services for individuals, local news, information, entertainment and shopping, and travel directions like those MapQuest already offers. This is a space Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp and others are all vying to control. AOL has been silent about this, but it's strongly positioned to make this play.

Google Maps may rule the roost, but MapQuest is good technology. Moreover, Patch, AOL's network of local news sites, is dying for a sustainable business model. AOL launched a daily deals platform tied to Patch in June, and a map-powered social news network would be an ideal place to market it. AOL has all the pieces it needs to build this thing. It just needs to put them together.

Can AOL Outdo Google?

It will need to do it well, though. Google is going wild in all of these areas. It bought The Dealmap to integrate its own daily deals into its Maps product, and it keeps expanding Google Offers to more markets. It bought Zagat to provide content for local business guides, a shot across the bow at Yelp. And Google's even going where AOL can't by pushing NFC payments for smartphones with Google Wallet, which would close the payments loop on all of these local business plays. If AOL is going to win this game, it has to swing for the fences.

Thanks very much to Fusible for three excellent scoops on the domain purchases and trademark applications.

Do you think AOL has a shot with its mqVibe neighborhood social network? Sound off in the comments.

AOL acquired Bebo, another social networking site, for $850 million in 2008 but sold it for around $10 million two years later. Ouch. AOL has not announced any news related to NVIBE, nor has the domain been linked to the trademark applications in any way other than the date of origin, but these trademarks clearly describe the features of a full-fledged social network.

Fusible was first to report these trademark applications by AOL Inc.:

Serial Number: 85419192
Online social networking services; online local and community social networking services

Serial Number: 85419185
Providing a website that enables users to connect with people in a particular neighborhood or city; Providing user-defined content and content of others selected and customized based on the known or estimated geographical location of users

Serial Number: 85419176
Providing neighborhood and community information in the fields of education, entertainment, local events and activities, current events, shopping, arts, culture, and sports; Providing information about community and neighborhood livability

Serial Number: 85419162
Providing geographic information, destination information, interactive maps, and driving directions via computer and communications networks; Providing information, news, and commentary in the field of travel via computer and communications networks

Serial Number: 85419151
Providing information and news in the field of local business

When more information about NVIBE comes to light, we'll be sure to report it.

Update 9/15 8:00 a.m.: Fusible has also discovered that AOL registered five similar trademarks for "Neighborhood Vibe" in August 2011; serial numbers 85391630, 85391628, 85391626, 85391625, 85391623. They also registered neighborhoodvibe.com on January 11 of this year.

(hat tip: Fusible)

But most importantly, in an effort to further define itself, AOL has made the bold decision to forgo real-time updates in favor of a magazine that you can actually finish reading throughout the course of the day.

Although you can schedule your download of AOL Editions for any time of day, the magazine is clearly designed to be the iPad equivalent of either the morning or evening newspaper. The idea is that it's the paper (or magazine, we suppose) which you would read over breakfast or after work, while relaxing at home with your iPad.

According to AOL's own internal research, morning and evening are the two times of day where people really engage with their iPads. And for this reason, AOL decided to forgo offering real-time updates within the application.

"So many things today are beeping at you with breaking news," explains Sol Lipman, Senior Director of Mobile at AOL, "we wanted to make something that was succinct and completable." He also notes that most iPad owners are sitting at a computer most of their day, and can get real-time news online.

With its focus on a once-per-day interaction, AOL Editions is like News Corp's app The Daily. But unlike The Daily, AOL Editions doesn't provide original content nor does it employ human editors.

Instead, the content is sourced from a limited selection of top sources and it uses smart algorithms that learn your preferences as you tap through and read stories. These automated bots track things like what you clicked, how long you read an article and what topics you tend to prefer, among other things. Users can further refine the personalized experience by connecting to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and by choosing their favorite sections during the setup process.

Personalization Features

Each of the 15 sections (e.g. Design, Tech, Business, Family, Health & Fitness, Sports, Entertainment, Travel, etc.) can be edited to include your favorite sources and subjects. You can also sync with iCal and Facebook to see your events, meetings and birthdays on the magazine's homepage. And articles can be saved and shared by email, Facebook or Twitter.

The app offers a few cute touches, too, like a delivery notification that mimics the sound of a paper boy or girl riding up on a bike and throwing a newspaper on your doorstep and a section showing today's weather on the magazine's cover where the mailing label would be on a traditional publication.

There's also an interesting feature that involves using keywords for even more refined personalization. Each article is tagged with keywords, which themselves are sourced from Wikipedia entries about the article's subject.

Sources themselves, like BusinessWeek or CNN, for example, can also be selected as keywords.

"Personalize!," shouts the header where the keywords are displayed, "Tap the check on the things you want to see more of and the X on things you don't."

That seems straightforward enough for even non-geeks to understand.

Pageviews for AOL Properties & Others

Of course, this is an AOL product, so it leverages its own properties here, including Huffington Post, and all the brands that now fall under Arianna Huffington's watch as Editor-in-Chief, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, the local news content from Patch and others. It does not, however, appear to give any sort of weighted preference to AOL brands as news sources, as far as we can tell in our tests. It did however, attribute an article of mine here on ReadWriteWeb to the editor, Richard MacManus instead of me. And it put a slash in "Read/WriteWeb," even though we dropped that ages ago. But in the grand scheme of things, these are minor quirks and easily resolved.

Download for Free

AOL Editions is a product from AOL's "Mobile-First" group, a group whose focus is to develop new brands for AOL, like the recently launched music app AOL Play. With AOL Editions, the hope here is clearly to deliver a way to increase pageviews at AOL properties, within the context of an iPad application for consuming news. Editions sends readers directly to the article's website when tapped. It doesn't strip out text or ads, or attempt to reformat the article in an iPad-friendly format. It is displayed as the publisher chose, including inline photos or video, when applicable.

AOL Editions is a free download for iPad. You can learn more about Editions here. The download is expected to go live at midnight, perhaps sooner.

Patch Deals, like Groupon, Living Social and other similar coupon-sharing startups, is a group-buying deals program that targets local communities. Users sign up for free to receive email alerts from businesses and can then click on any deal that is of interest to them. As is typical with group-buying deals programs, businesses can set a certain number of deals they need before the deal is "on," or "tipped," in the discount shoppers' lingo.

On Patch, merchants can list their deals for free, but will not have to share as high a percentage of revenue as with Groupon or Living Social, a strategic move that could spell trouble for its rivals.

While Patch is better known for its hyperlocal editorial content - i.e., local news reports on over 800 Patch.com sites - it also provides a platform for local business listings. At present, over 850,000 small businesses across the U.S. are featured on its network.

Where Serve Fits In

In the new partnership with Serve, Patch users may be offered co-branded American Express cards which would allow them to take part in a deal without having to print out physical coupons to show to the merchant. Instead, the card itself would function as the means for using the deal in the offline world. In effect, this turns the American Express Serve card into something more like a store loyalty card, but pre-loaded with coupons from local businesses all around town.

Serve, which launched in March, is aimed at attracting new market segments who don't rely on credit cards. Serve accounts are pre-loaded with funds from a bank account, a credit or debit card, or money from another Serve account. Then, using these pre-funded cards, Serve customers can shop anywhere a merchant accepts American Express, both online and off. And through an existing partnership with a mobile payment startup Payfone, Serve users can also purchase digital and physical goods using their mobile phone. In addition, users can check on their accounts via Android and iPhone apps and through Facebook.

For AOL Huffington Post Media Group, which oversees the ever-expanding Patch operation, a local deals platform only makes sense, given its goal to be the de facto source of local and neighborhood news and information, as well as a place to connect with local businesses. With the new Serve partnership, it makes it that much easier for Patch to reach that goal.

Correction: An earlier version of this article implied that Patch Deals was different from Groupon because merchant listings were free. The key difference will be in revenue sharing, which is reportedly lower on Patch than on its rivals.

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.

Is the Huffington Post a good or bad actor in regards to the future of media? Traditional media outlets have bemoaned the Huffington Post's habit of aggregating the first few paragraphs of other sites' stories, calling them traffic and revenue leaches. My experience has been just the opposite: getting picked up by the Huffington Post has lead to a huge number of readers coming to read our articles here at ReadWriteWeb.

Can the Huffington Post strategy scale all the way up to AOL size? "AOL just bought SEO," says New York tech exec Ian Schafer.

Can AOL be saved, even by HuffPo? Reports last month, based on AOL's financial reporting, concluded that despite all its various media and content efforts - 80% of AOL's revenues are still based on subscribers holding over since the dial-up days. AOL reported subscriber revenues of $244 million on 4 million customers in the 3rd quarter of last year alone. 75% are are allegedly paying for AOL service they don't need anymore because they already have broadband internet. That's not a good sign.

Can the Huffington Post strategy bring in as much or more revenue than that? While eyeballs have come online fast, ad revenues have been much slower to move. That's in large part because in the old media world, advertisers used to say "half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half that is." So they bought both halves. Online, that's not the case. Every click and every conversion is countable - so ad buys can be made much more rational. Thus much less media gets sponsored. It's hard to say how this is all going to play out in the long run.

AOL is making a strong move, though, in spending more than an entire financial quarter's subscription revenue on one big content shop and its leadership.

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.

David Carr at the New York Times tweets: "Must Read, Must Not Emulate: Fascinating Look Inside the Word Gulag at AOL." Tech journalist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says, "AOL expects its staff writers to write 5 to 10 stories per day! Yeah. Right. That's going to happen." Social media analyst Jessica Well says, "Yeah... quantity over quality... that's the spirit, AOL! :/"

I'm sure the writers filling those quotas are paid more than the $5 per post that I got paid 5 years ago. When I took the position the pay had just gone up from $4 per post!

At that time I was also writing 6 posts per day about international currency speculation, as a subcontractor for a CMS company. And doing 3 to 5 interviews per week with a nonprofit technology organization. I was producing roughly 10 to 12 posts per day. Having landed those three gigs, I quit my minimum wage job at a convenience store in my home town. (Thanks, AOL content farm!)

Were those posts any good? They were good enough that when tech blog top story aggregator Techmeme launched, I had 8 headlines there in 8 weeks. Then one day Michael Arrington called and hired me at TechCrunch. "You keep beating us to stories," he told me. I was able to do that because I was getting RSS feeds from key vendors in our market delivered by IM and SMS. That's standard practice among tech bloggers now, but at the time no one else was doing it, so I was able to cover lots of news first. The fact that I was able to do it under the AOL banner, for any pay at all, was a great platform for me.

Right: Barb Dybwad, then at AOL, took this picture of me showing her a blog I was working on for a local natural foods store when we met at the first tech industry event I attended, an unconference called Tag Camp. A few months later, Barb hired me to write for AOL. Today she's at a site called Tecca. Thanks, Barb!

Now I'm the co-editor of ReadWriteWeb and I'm happy to report that things are very different for me.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we pay our writers far better, but we do ask full timers to write 5 posts each day. We ask them to write smart, informed, quality posts. Preferably before anyone else does. It's very hard, but very enjoyable work.

You know what, though? We've got a full time news spot open right now and I'm having a hard time filling it. I think of AOL, big as it is, as a farm team in the minor leagues. I made a splash in the minors and then got called up to the major leagues. Where are the minor leagues now, though? Where are the tech bloggers who have toiled for too little pay, pumped out large quantities of content and proven themselves to have potential to work on a different level?

I don't know where those sites are anymore. If they appear again, though, I'm guessing they'll look like content farms.

The executives behind such outfits, publishing on mass scale, are inevitably going to treat writers and readers like worthless pawns in a chess game worth billions of dollars. It would be a mistake to expect them to do anything else.

But some of those people will demonstrate that they aren't just pawns, that they are writers, journalists and power-bloggers.

Big league bloggers and writers these days need to be able to write well, in large quantity and quickly. It's not easy, but who said writing for a living, in an era when anyone can publish with ease, was going to be easy?

So AOL, go build a giant content farm for mainstream readers. I'm sure some of the content will be worth reading, and though management's priorities are SEO and monetization, I'm sure many of the writers will sneak in some gems. While you've got them, give them a trial by fire, too. Then send them our way. Or don't - if they are capable of stepping up to the plate and hitting homeruns - hopefully we'll find them before our competitors do.

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?

Identity

People need placeholders on the web, hubs for identity, calling cards; though Facebook owns identity today, that grasp is only as strong as the begrudging love of its users. People both love and hate Facebook - and a very large percentage of them don't trust it.

Tell them they can get a simple, attractive, clearly understandable central identity repository on the web and they may respond well. That may be more true in the future than it is today. That's at least part of AOL's bet on About.me.

Call it a logical way to take advantage of widespread digital photography, call it Glamour Shots 2.0, call it what OpenID wished it could be but with a much better User Experience. Will people want to use this service? Many people undoubtedly will. Funny looking people, maybe not, but most people online (and on AOL) are good-looking San Francisco artist types, right?

Analytics

In addition to having a much better name than competitor Flavors.me, About.me also offers simple but attractive personal analytics.

Its users are presented a dashboard view of the number of times their profiles have been viewed, the number of inbound links to their page and the people they interact with most commonly on other social networks.

That sounds simple, but if well executed this is what such an analytics feature promises: you are here on the internet, it's a big part of your life, let's set you up with some way to keep track of your experience and how it changes over time.

It's part of a larger trend, too. O'Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures invested last month in RunKeeper, a service that tracks all kinds of exercise experiences its users have and share, and they said it fit under the broader category of the quantified self.

About.me's analytics are like the Quantified Self for a person's experience across the social web.

Talent

In acquiring this new startup, AOL lands the talent of multiple serial entrepreneurs, most notably Tony Conrad. Conrad was already a "special advisor to AOL" after the sale of his last startup, Sphere, to the company. He's also the best-known face at venture capital firm True Ventures, on the Board of Directors at Automattic (WordPress), sold Oddpost to Yahoo and now landed more millions for selling a not-even-launched startup to AOL.

If you're someone who is suspect of people with thick, elite resumes, you're probably suspect of this guy. He recorded a charming video today with his old friend Michael Arrington and said he sold to AOL because of the natural synergy between the startup and its acquirer, believe it or not. (Silicon Alley Insider got the real story on why the startup sold so fast.)

Get a little bit more of his time spent at AOL, together with Arrington, Jason Shellen, creator of Google Reader and most recently co-founder of Thing Labs (Shellen worked on a startup called Plinky with About.me's Freitas, too) and a growing number of others, and you've got a pretty strong team of Web 2.0 winners. That's the kind of experience that could inform some decisions that would help get AOL back in the game.

Put all of those factors together and the deal looks more interesting. Can AOL put About.me to good use? Time will tell. Who knows? Maybe this is just a silly website, hyped in a circle by Valley insiders and bought by a desperate old Internet company for far too much money. Time will tell.

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.?

Glam Media calls itself the "the pioneer and global leader of Vertical Media," by which it means a combination of flagship properties and small publishers in a particular vertical - in Glam's case, lifestyle content. It claims to have over 1,400 publishers worldwide operating within its network. As well as Glam.com and Brash.com, a site called Tinker.com brings social media into the mix (primarily Facebook and Twitter).

Glam Media is highly ambitious. According to a recent article in business analysis site Crain's, Glam Media founder and chief executive Samir Arora "plans to grow Glam's head count to 1,000 from its current 300, with emphasis on technology hires." His goal is for Glam Media to be "no. 1 in all brand advertising to women."

Arora compares his company's model to cable television, saying that the 1,400+ sites in its network are like niche TV channels.

While Glam Media doesn't specifically compete with AOL, or other portals such as Yahoo! and MSN, it's interesting to compare the two models. Glam specifically focuses on 'lifestyle' type content, yet it also targets a very wide audience: basically all women and as many men as it can get. Glam Media and AOL are going after much the same audience: the mainstream.

The difference between the two companies isn't the content, per se. Because AOL does lifestyle content too. In fact it has its own network of sites in its living.aol.com section. And with the Seed program, AOL is attempting to tap into 'the long tail' of blogs and small publishers - just like Glam Media.

Yet AOL does much more than just lifestyle content. It does news, email, music, and so on. So it must be a concern to them that a relatively small upstart "vertical media" company is breathing down its neck in terms of visitor numbers.

I think it's refreshing to see a media company focus on something it does well - and growing that - rather than spreading itself over many different market segments. Although it should be noted that Glam Media does not actually own the vast majority of sites it includes in its network, which many people rightly see as a risk to Glam's model. After all, if you don't outright own the content then how much control over your brand do your really have?

Nevertheless, Glam Media is feeling confident. Founder Samir Arora told Venturebeat in March: "We should be bigger than AOL very shortly."

Judging by the current growth of Glam Media and the stagnation of AOL, that could be within a few months.

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.

Team Brizzly will be put to work on AOL's social stream reading product, Lifestream. That product has been widely praised from a technical level, but has failed to gain substantial market traction, with a reported 5 million users throughout the last year.

The Tragedy of the Feeds

That's less than 1% as many people as Facebook sees every month, but the Facebook Newsfeed has changed the way millions of people now experience the internet. When Shellen and Darnell lead the creation of Google Reader long ago (it will turn 5 years old next month) the team must have hoped that the power of RSS feeds would transform the lives of everyday people as it had begun to for super-early-adopters using other feed readers like NetNewsWire (Mac, born 2002) and FeedDemon (Windows).

Other RSS readers proliferated, then the market consolidated and then it collapsed. Google Reader was left as the primary RSS reader standing, all other major products synced to it, and only so many people used it anyway.

As a journalist who lives and breathes RSS through a variety of different products, the fate of the grown-up feed reader market breaks my heart.

None the less, many people began reading syndicated news update subscriptions instead through Twitter and in some cases, Facebook. Where three tiny letters (Really Simple Syndication) apparently scared hundreds of millions of people away from the power of feed reading, the simpler social interfaces welcomed them with open arms.

Shellen and Darnell began working on products to fit this new era of feed or stream reading at Thing Labs. There's something about the Brizzly product, in the context of RSS's giant flop, that feels condescending. It says: dear world, you were too dumb to handle a slightly different interface and a lot of messages that made you feel like you had unread emails - how about we give you a cuddly cartoon bear instead? Maybe I'm just bitter, though. I continue to build incredible value out of feeds, but I'd be able to enjoy far more value if the rest of the world understood their beauty.

Now the men behind the only lasting product from Feed Era Stage 1 will be brought in-house at AOL to try and help that company challenge Facebook, so dominant already in the early (social) Feed Era Stage 2.

The acquisition was long rumored but first reported today by marketing blogger Louis Gray, then confirmed definitively by industry news blog Paid Content. See also coverage from the now-AOL network blog TechCrunch, which apparently first reported on the rumors.

The official release from AOL is here.

The new agreement between AOL and Google comes shortly after Microsoft and Yahoo finalized the transition from Yahoo's search engine to Microsoft's Bing. Based on comScore's data, Google and AOL currently command about 68.1% of the search market in the U.S. and the combined market share of Microsoft and Yahoo is about 28.1%.

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.

The fund is specifically targeted toward filling in gaps and adding data to the specific U.S. communities covered by AOL's hyperlocal news, business and event listing resource, Patch. At present, Patch supports select communities in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. Localized editions of Patch include embedded maps across the site's many pages, displaying relevant news and events. The data on these maps already comes from OpenStreetMap, as opposed to MapQuest's own service.

AOL's head of engineering, Local and Mapping, Randy Meech, made the announcement of the company's new initiatives at the fourth annual international OpenStreetMap conference, State of the Map 2010, in Girona, Spain. One of the slides from Meech's presentation addresses the question many may have regarding this new project: "Why is it starting in the U.K., not the U.S.?" According to Meech, the U.K. and Germany are ahead in quality right now, and the "navigability needs improvement" in the U.S. The fund, obviously, should help with some of these issues.

Fighting Google and Bing with Open Source?

Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, praised AOL for its efforts, calling its move to join up with the open-source movement one that "represents rare foresight in recognizing that the future of map data will be a commons."

But for AOL, the move is likely less about the feel-good aspect of supporting open source and more of a calculated business decision. Using open data will allow the company to quickly ramp up its maps with more information and details, including things like bike paths, hiking trails, parks and neighborhood streets, without having to invest significant funds in order to do so. While the end result may not have the whizz-bang of competitors like Google Maps or Bing Maps with their Street Views, map applications, Bird's Eye views, 3D features and other advancements, the open maps may, in some cases, end up being more accurate thanks to the crowd-sourced data coming from local residents.

It's a smart strategy for a brand whose name was once so aligned with mapping it actually became a verb: "Just MapQuest it." Oddly enough, people often still say that today, but then head over to Google Maps instead. MapQuest hopes it's not too late to change that.

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.

"Having insight into user intent through its leading search products enables Yahoo! to identify topics important to advertisers and users. Yahoo! plans to use Associated Content to create content around those topics and leverage Associated Content to contribute content to existing media properties."

Business Insider pointed out that Associated Content, backed in part by AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, had considered AOL to be the most likely buyer, but they decided to launch the SEED "open content submission platform" instead.

Competitors include AOL and Demand Media. Demand has been criticized for producing a large amount of arguably low-quality content and is thought to be preparing for an IPO.

Associated Content also brings along the deals it has with publishers like Reuters, Turner, Scripps and Fox.