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Paul Berry, the Huffington Post's CTO since 2007, is one of the best regarded tech leaders in New York. After helping build one of the biggest news sites in the world, Berry announced this week that he's leaving AOL soon to focus on two new ventures: A social startup called Rebel Mouse and an incubator called SoHo Tech Lab to goof around with a bunch of different ideas and see what works.

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.

• 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

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.

The giant online publisher and aggregator Huffington Post began experimenting with a new content recommendation engine today, powered by Facebook and built by AdaptiveSemantics, the startup the company acquired last June. The feature uses the "Liked" Pages and shared articles of logged-in Facebook users who visit the Post to recommend recent content from across its wide swath of articles.

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

Google's AdSense for Feeds, the RSS publishing service formerly known as FeedBurner, got a long-overdue refresh today and now displays subscriber and reader interaction stats in real time. When will Google Analytics get real-time stats? That's the question many people are asking - but it's not entirely clear how useful that would be.

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.

In a blog post published yesterday, Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington officially announced the launch of a new section on the site called Small Business America.

The newly-profitable, left-leaning mega-site got its start covering and aggregating news about politics five years ago and has been branching out into other topics ever since.

Today Howard Fineman, a reporter at Newsweek for 30 years, announced he's leaving the beleaguered weekly to become a senior editor at The Huffington Post.

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.

Tumblr is quickly becoming one of the Web's most popular and unique platforms on which to share and discover interesting content of all media. According to Tumblr, over 5.3 million posts are made each day by the service's over 7.5 million users. Posts are passed on over and over through Tumblr's "reblog" feature, but at such a high volume it's easy to lose track of where content originated. Tumblr hopes to solve this dilemma with some new attribution functionality launched earlier today.

Known by many as The Big Apple, and by some in the tech scene as Silicon Alley, New York City has been an international hub for media, art and business for decades. More recently New York has ebbed and flowed with the success and failures of the Internet startup culture, and is now well on its way to cementing its reputation alongside Silicon Valley as a driving global force in the industry.

Last night at Guardian News & Media's internal Future of Journalism conference, Arianna Huffington revealed that her Huffington Post property is planning to expand into local news. Initially, the site will launch an edited news aggregation site (similar to the main Huffington Post web site) localized for the US metro area around Chicago, Illinois. The site will be managed by a single editor to start. "We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news [sic], not just the political blogging the way we began," Huffington said to the conference attendees.