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.

• Survey Asks Huffpo Bloggers: Do You Feel Exploited? http://bit.ly/g8CYyp via @Yanazure
• Sigmund Freud on mobile devices: "Man has become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times." http://bit.ly/fJMJij via @designlearning
• Robot Overlords: Forbes' new blog on future of technology, culture, transhumanism and the Singularity: http://bit.ly/fmXP3g via @accelerations
• One English Professor's 3,200 Facebook Essays: http://bo.st/fmSSnj via @nan_tri
• I HAZ LINKROT?!? On the Etiquette of Internet Citations: http://bit.ly/ffzR0d via @mikethemadbiol

What links did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

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.

It looks like a good and relatively simple feature. Surprisingly, HuffPo readers responding in comments on the announcement absolutely hate it!

Could objections to using this data be rooted in the ongoing lack of clarity around Facebook's privacy settings? Or did the company just shoot itself in the foot so badly 12 months ago when it made drastic privacy policy changes that people still distrust it today?

The Down Side

Reader comments range from confusion about the feature to distrust of anything associated with Facebook ("I don't have one of those," several people have said) to distrust of recommendations to concern about self-reenforcing political perspectives.

"Great," one frustrated comment read, "put your readers to work for you, is it not enough that we have to deal with your advertisements." Unbelievable!

Another: "If it involves Facebook, you can count me out.

Those are just two comments of many. So far there's not been a single positive one posted! As a technologist, excited about the future of personalized recommendations to assist in discovery, I find this fascinating.

Behind the scenes, though - I believe that the Huffington Post has long been a very data-driven editorial organization. ("See Demi Moore in a bikini!") The company has been experimenting, for example, with attention decay algorithms that move content up or down the front page. Maybe those data-centric practices need to be kept in the background, where readers can't see them and are thus less likely to object.

Problems for Publishers

Other than the unhappy reaction the feature has seen from readers, there are other risks to implementing this kind of technology.

The down side of this for a publisher like Huffington is of course further indebtedness to Facebook. Facebook as identity provider, Facebook as user personalization data bank, it's not customary for publishers to feel comfortable allowing a 3rd party to control all the data about their own readers. Facebook puts conditions on the use of that data too, such as prohibiting caching of the data.

The trade-off is that the ease of use means the publisher gets far more data and far more accurate data. Publishers who collect user data in a vacuum provide little incentive for their readers to input information about themselves that's true - in this case the Huffington Post reader data comes from a context where accuracy is incentivized by discoverability by a person's friends.

For users - it looks like a win. Once you opt-in to connecting your Facebook account and your activity on the Huffington Post, the recommendations appear topical and interesting. That's how it strikes me, but other people sure seem unhappy about it.

Feed subscriber numbers are generally good to know, and revenues from feeds are better than a poke in the eye. But ultimately pageviews are what matter most to publishers. People say that Feedburner has declined in importance because of the rise of Twitter, but no publishing middleware is as important as readers landing on your page itself. There is potential for these kinds of real-time analytics to be leveraged for automated optimization of editorial decision making, but that's a relatively nascent field.

Are real-time analytics really useful? Not everyone agrees that they are.
"95% of the time it's simply a fun way to look at who's on your site and where they're browsing," Joel Lewenstein, a Product Designer at Quora says, on Quora.

"Though it's entertaining to watch this happen moment-by-moment, the realtime analytics are never as actionable as more robust systems, like Google Analytics.

"Beyond fun, though, we've found it incredibly useful for site diagnostics. When we get alerts that load balancers or servers are down, Chartbeat provides a nice check-and-balance: is the site really down (for actual, real users) or is it a false alarm?"

Heavy publishers of news-oriented content may not feel the same, however. HP is working with the Huffington Post, for example, to integrate the technology company's modeling of the growth and decay of audience attention into an automated editorial process that moves stories up and down the HuffPo page. Real-time analytics may help any number of publishers optimize highly flexible site layouts to capture maximum reader interest.

Could a real-time FeedBurner enable that kind of strategic move on the part of publishers? It certainly seems possible.

Newsweek has been struggling financially and The Washington Post Company sold the magazine for a small fee and its debt in August. The buyer was Sidney Harman, a businessman and philanthropist.

But some of Newsweek's old media veterans are finding a place in the new media world. Mark Coatney, a senior editor and manager of Newsweek's social media presence on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, was one of Newsweek's more high-profile staffers to leave.

The Newsweek Tumblr was praised for its conversational tone and quickly gained a following. But Coatney left Newsweek around the time of the sale to take a position at... Tumblr. He's now their media liaison, working with publications to make their content social (see Newsweek Editor Jumps Ship to New, New Media; Joins Tumblr).

Fineman said he decided to go to The Huffington Post because the Web is "where the action is." "The chance to dive headlong into the future is one that I don't think anyone could pass up," he told The New York Times Media Decoder blog.

Sounds like a major change for a career reporter at a weekly glossy to suddenly find himself at an online-only publication. The hire is also a bit of a breach for The Huffington Post, which relies on a younger staff and unpaid guest bloggers. But cross-pollination between new and old media is something we're starting to see more of as bloggers get hired at newspapers, newspaper reporters get hired at blogs and bloggers get called on during White House press briefings.

Now, Tumblr has made is easy for users to add attribution metadata to posts just as they would tags and other information. This is great for users who want to credit where they found an interesting photo, quote or article, but this feature is a huge benefit to publishers.

As we mentioned earlier this summer, many popular publishers - including Newsweek, Huffington Post and The New Yorker - have flocked to Tumblr to share content in a new way. With this new attribution feature, they can rest assured that their content will be properly attributed as it is shared throughout the community.

This kind of publisher-friendly feature is likely a direct result of Tumblr's latest talent grab, Mark Coatney, formerly an editor at Newsweek. Coatney's new position is to serve as a liaison between Tumblr and media publications who want to leverage the platform, so it's likely Tumblr will continue to add features that will make publishers happy.

That makes sense given that analysts have predicted that local ad spending will jump 48% this year to $12.6 billion. The majority of those ads will be search advertising, but clearly, local information is hot with consumers. We've written about the rise of hyperlocal information on ReadWriteWeb before -- Huffington and company are seeking to take advantage of this trend. They want to turn the Huffington Post into a national, virtual newspaper group -- think Gannett or McClatchy but completely online.

And that makes sense, too. A comScore study that we reported on in March revealed that 38% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 are unlikely to read a physical newspaper during a typical week, but non-news readers are still voracious consumers of news. They just get their news online -- and not just from traditional newspaper sites.

"Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier than average news consumers - they just prefer to consume it in a digital format," said comScore executive vice president Jack Flanagan. "That they are receptive to print, TV, and Internet news brands indicates a broad opportunity online, but the brands that will ultimately win over these key news consumers are the ones that successfully integrate cutting edge digital content with high quality journalism." Clearly, that is a message that HuffPo gets -- their tag line is "The Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community," and Arianna Huffington said last night that much of their venture funding will go toward building out a team of reporters. Last year they hired BBC reporter Elinor Shields to become the sites managing editor.

However, the Huffington Post is an edited aggregator -- a team of editors oversees the site and specifically decides what links get space on the sites, writes headlines by hand, selects images, etc. Last year I wrote for a competitor to the Huffington Post in the political news blogosphere, and from first hand experience I can tell you that it is hard work to gather and post news links and manage original and wire content. It will be interesting to see if HuffPo will be able to scale their local strategy to compete with automated local news aggregators like Outsite.in and YourStreet (our coverage).

Image credit: jdlasica