While the spotlight is only now really focusing sharply on this badly-written law, SOPA first attracted criticism months ago. Back in November, a letter [PDF] was sent to four high-seated U.S. politicians in the Senate and House of Representatives. It was signed by nine Internet behemoths: AOL, Google, Facebook, Ebay, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Twitter, Yahoo!, and Zynga. In said letter, the companies said they “were concerned that [measures proposed by SOPA] pose a serious risk to our industry’s continued track record of innovation and job creation.” They wanted SOPA to be pulled down. They saw it as ham-fisted and harmful, and they were prepared to speak out about it.

Many of us found the united stance of these companies heartening. The Internet’s meanest gunslingers had rode into town to help the little guys. So why, as we enter SOPA Blackout Day, have so many of those outspoken tech firms delivered such limp-wristed protests?

Check the sites of those who signed that November 2011 letter, and anti-SOPA sentiment is all but invisible. AOL, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Zynga, Ebay: at the time of writing, none of these have a single syllable about SOPA anywhere on their front pages. Twitter also skirts the issue, with CEO Dick Costolo even calling the shutting down of sites “foolish.” Mozilla does mention SOPA in a blog post linked on its front page, though it’s well below the fold. Next to all of these, Google’s response – an anti-SOPA Google Doodle and a link to a petition addressed to Congress – looks positively revolutionary.

Tellingly, Wikipedia (which didn’t sign the aforementioned letter, and hey – doesn’t answer to shareholders) is the only online giant to stage an effective protest, blacking itself out for 24 hours. It’s a powerful move from a site that remains the fifth most popular in the world, and it will have an effect. It is joined by Reddit, and then a further clump of middle-sized sites and companies, such as BoingBoing and the Cheezburger network. The gesture is appreciated by opponents of SOPA, but there’s a nagging feeling that the big boys, the heroes who signed that November letter, have let the side down.

There’s another reason the relative inaction of bigger sites is disappointing. Sites such as Reddit and BoingBoing are far more likely to be visited by educated readers, people who already know about the sinister SOPA. Temporarily closing a site like Reddit or BoingBoing is a ballsy move, and will justifiably win admirers, but it feels like these few bold sites are preaching to the choir.

I am convinced more courageous action from the Internet’s big players could have shut SOPA down for good. Imagine if Facebook had closed its doors: 800 million users shut out in an instant. Imagine if sites like Yahoo!, AOL, and Twitter had yanked the shutters up. More intriguingly, imagine the complete storm if Google had shut up shop for just a few hours. The coverage would be immense, surely a billion more people would be educated, and the signatures would weigh in the tens of millions. SOPA (and its ugly sister PIPA) would be dead in the water. All in return for a few hours of downtime.

As it is, the pusillanimous reaction of these big sites means SOPA will now be able to retreat to the shadows and bide its time. It will be tweaked, refined, and will likely return in the future, insufficiently diluted. SOPA Blackout Day was an opportunity for the web to truly stand as one and deliver the killing blow to an unreasonable, poorly conceived law. SOPA will be back. Next time, let’s hope a few more giants deliver actions as well as words.

[Op-Ed] Why the Internet Giants Have Let SOPA Protestors Down is a post from: The Inquisitr

As a person who basically routes their entire life through the internet- professional, personal, lifestyle- one of the things that gets me agitated about the whole SOPA brouhaha is how little the average web user is concerned with the ostensible end of the internet as we know it.

The few outside communities like Reddit who are aware of even the existence of SOPA don’t really seem to comprehend how seriously it could impact even basic web use, and many worryingly seem to believe that the delayed passage does not mean- in the words of a Daily Kos writer- that the bill is “favored to pass.” (Which, you guys, it still is.)

The continued failure of the bulk of web users to realize the threat SOPA poses means that the few who understand the impact need to do everything in their power to wake the web up to its imminent potential destruction. And it seems that some of the biggest entities are considering a “nuclear option” to get users active, to spur political action and maybe- just maybe- convince lawmakers to ignore special interests and ditch SOPA.

AOL, eBay, Facebook, foursquare, Google, IAC, Linkedin, Mozilla, OpenDNS, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo! and the Zynga Game Network are all members of an organization called the NetCoalition, and there is said to be chatter about shutting off the sites for a time to drive home the message that a future with SOPA sucks for everyone. Daily Kos quotes:

When the home pages of Google.com, Amazon.com, Facebook.com, and their Internet allies simultaneously turn black with anti-censorship warnings that ask users to contact politicians about a vote in the U.S. Congress the next day on SOPA, you’ll know they’re finally serious…

“There have been some serious discussions about that,” says Markham Erickson, who heads the NetCoalition trade association that counts Google, Amazon.com, eBay, and Yahoo as members. “It has never happened before.”

Scarily, not even the action proposed is guaranteed to stop SOPA or the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), but it would be a hell of a newfangled protest and could be a political game-changer.

Are you concerned about SOPA?

SOPA-Opposing Web Giants Consider ‘Nuclear Option’ to Thwart Law is a post from: The Inquisitr

Michael Arrington, TechCrunch founder and wearer of acerbic T-shirts, has resurfaced with a new blog, promising ‘transparency’ and ‘truth.’

Arrington was banished as co-editor of TechCrunch last month, after new owner AOL decided he had a conflict of interest as a TechCrunch editor and owner of a new $20 million investment venture, the CrunchFund.

Arrington’s new blog, Uncrunched, launched on Friday with a single post titled, ‘Here I Am.’ Those three words were the entire post, though that didn’t stop users logging over 500 comments. Comfortingly, this was the first of those.

By Sunday, Arrington had found the Upload/Insert window in WordPress and wrote a far more substantial post titled, ‘What Exactly Am I Doing Here At Uncrunched?‘ Spoiler: he’s there so he can write what the hell he likes:

“One thing I knew for sure was that I’d never trick readers, or lie to them, or otherwise be shady. It’s not me. And even if it was me, it’s too easy to get caught. The easy path was the one where transparency was shining brightly. That was never enough to stop the journalism community’s antibodies from hitting TechCrunch hard over all the conflicts of interest that were inherently part of who I am. We fought through all that for years, and I kept fighting until my pen was removed from my hand, so to speak, by AOL a couple of weeks ago. Now I’ve got a new pen, though. And a blank slate. Infinite choices, I get to choose my own path. All that jazz.”

Arrington hasn’t held back on his dispute with AOL, which acquired TechCrunch for $25 million in September 2010. He’s been particularly vocal about his run-ins with Arianna Huffington, the president and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post Media Group.

He appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt a fortnight ago sporting the “Unpaid Blogger” shirt you see above – a shot at the role he was limited to at TechCrunch after he was ousted – and was never short of a sarcastic comment over his dealings with AOL and Huffington.

Then, of course, there’s the name of his new internet den: ‘Uncrunched’ suggests Arrington isn’t ready to let bygones be bygones.

Michael Arrington Launches New Blog is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember that AOL.com email address you decided not to hold onto when everyone jumped ship to hotmail and then eventually gmail, it turns out those addresses are now considered some sort of weird status symbol among some of the nation’s elite.

According to Politico the accounts are being used and even flaunted by David Axelrod, Matt Drudge, Arianna Huffington and Ann Coulter. The Arianna email makes sense since she’s now part of the AOL family but apparently she was using it before the HuffPost buyout was even a murmur on our radar.

It’s not just business moguls who are using the account, actor Paul Rudd has recently admitted to using an AOL.com address, so has Judd Apatow, Steve Carell, Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman.

Rudd told Playboy he uses the system because:

“I like AOL because it’s so embarrassing. People look at you as if you’re a fossil. Which you are. But I enjoy that embarrassment,” while adding, “I like being on the outside. Having an AOL address is like wearing Ocean Pacific shorts. It’s so uncool that it’s cool.”

So there you have it, you can’t be one of the cool people unless you’re sporting a pair of spandex pants and an AOL.com account (please forget the spandex for your sake and ours).

Do you still use an AOL.com account? If you do, have you been actively using it all these years, even after ditching AOL internet services? I don’t even know if mine is still active after all of these years.

AOL Email Addresses Are Only For Cool People, No Seriously is a post from: The Inquisitr

What do AOL, Inc., Google. Inc., IAC Search & Media, Inc., Gannett Company, Inc. and Target Corporation have in common? They were all named today in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by I/P Engine, Inc. in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for unlawfully using systems that incorporate features claimed in two patents owned by I/P Engine, Inc.

I/P Engine’s patents are directed to relevance filtering technology used in the search engine industry in producing better search results. It is also the dominant technology used in search advertising to position high quality advertisements.

In standing his ground, Andrew K. Lang, Chief Executive Officer of I/P Engine and co-inventor of the patents, argued:

“These patents, which we own, apply to relevance filtering techniques that are fundamental to the technology employed by the defendants in their highly profitable search business.  The defendants have infringed on our patents.  We are committed to upholding our rights with respect to these patents.  We have the resources and focus to assert our intellectual property.”

The patents were actually part of a portfolio of 8 patents that I/P Engine purchased from Lycos, Inc. which they bought as well from WiseWire Corporation. The latter is an entitiy founded by Lang together with Donald Kosak. As part of the acquisition, Lang and Kosak both joined Lycos. They are now shareholders and members of I/P Engine’s executive team.

In the meantime, the battle for search supremacy continues.

AOL, Google, IAC, Gannett Sued for Infringement of Search Patents is a post from: The Inquisitr

Ariana Huffington’s major cash out on the Huffington Post hasn’t been without incident, and the noisy group of unpaid sweatshop writers who provided much of the site’s multi-million dollar content haven’t shut up- they’ve filed a class action lawsuit.

The suit is headed by writer and union organizer Jonathan Tasini, himself an unpaid HuffPo contributor up until three days after the Aol buyout was announced. Tasini has tangled with media giants before, winning a settlement against the New York Times over the fate of freelancer content.

I posted a few weeks back about the ethical spot Huffington herself is in with the allegations- she often spouts off on TV, rightfully and righteously, about corporate exploitation of the middle and working class while herself gaining massive wealth off the unpaid contributions of writers. To argue no one is forced to spend hours researching and writing a HuffPo post is to lend credence to the idea no one is forced to work excessive hours in dangerous conditions with no paid time off or health coverage, wouldn’t you say?

Huffington recently penned the book Third World America, and in a lengthy screed, described the impetus behind the book:

It was the way that Washington rushed to the rescue of Wall Street but forgot about Main Street. It was the daily drumbeat of depressing statistics: One in five Americans unemployed or underemployed. One in nine families unable to make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans on food stamps.

Upward mobility has always been at the center of the American Dream — a promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll do well, and your children will have the chance to do even better.

Well, that promise has been broken, and America’s middle class is under assault. The American Dream is becoming a nightmare.

What became clear while writing the book is that the decline of the middle class was no accident. Middle-class America didn’t suddenly lose its mojo. It was the result of tricks and traps. Tricks in the ways we financed our homes. Traps in the ways credit-card companies used hidden fees and fine print and skyrocketing interest rates to get their hands on our money, driving more and more people into debt.

The suit will definitely interest anyone who makes their living writing for the web, and could stand to change conditions for exploited freelancers in this fairly horrific job market. What do you think about the move to sue Huffington and her blog? Do you think the court will side with the writers or the media empire?

HuffPo, Aol, Arianna hit with lawsuit by unpaid bloggers is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ll admit it- I have a strong prejudice against certain email address domains and even occasionally try to convert people still using undesirable domains.

I don’t know what this says about me (I’m sure it’s not entirely positive), but it seems that the email domain attached to your address at least strongly correlates to some specific profiles. Hunch.com gathered demographic data on 70,000 people, and drafted some general illustrations of what email addresses say about users. The gold standard indicated was firstname.lastname@gmail.com, Vice president of marketing for Hunch Kelly Ford explained:

“It makes it easier for people to remember your name, plus it’s more professional than something that mentions your favorite brand or has a series of numbers… Just like you would carefully pick out clothes to wear to an interview, you want to choose your e-mail domain with the same precision and think about the impression you want to make.”

Email snob fist bump, Kelly. Ford also expounded upon the common threads found surrounding certain domains. GMail users, the study indicated, tended to be more “wordly” males, who were thin, young and have gone places and done things. GMail users also tended to be liberal, childless, prefer digital to physical media (MP3s to CDs) and probably spend a lot of time in coffeehouses talking about locally sourced tomatoes. Okay, I added that last part.

Hotmail users, on the other hand, were found to be more likely suburban females of “average build,” who still live with mom, have a pessimistic attitude, and like “contemporary fiction” and desserts. Users with Yahoo addresses tended to be overweight females ranging up to the age of 49, who, by the general description given, were not at all worldly and frankly, kind of slovenly. AOL users were- is this surprising?- the bottom of the worldliness barrel, as well as older and fatter than all users of the other domains included. (The Oatmeal called this a while back.)

Basically, what you can take away from this is stop using AOL for email if you haven’t already. Christ. Also, if you haven’t jumped on the GMail bandwagon, it’s probably a good idea to try to claim at least part of your actual name for professional use.

Are you judgmental about email address domains? Would you trust someone with your business if they’re emailing you professionally from an AOL account?

Study says email domain stereotypes really do bear out is a post from: The Inquisitr

Off the bat, I will admit to having an intense girl-crush on Arianna Huffington.

I’ve been an ardent fan of both Politically Incorrect and Real Time with Bill Maher for a decade and a half, and I find Huffington’s passionate pleas on behalf of the exploited middle and working class during her frequent appearances to be moving, convincing and compelling. Admittedly, I haven’t read two of her books dealing with the issue, “Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America” and “Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream,” but both have been on my “want to read” list for quite a while.

And when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert responded to internet demand for an anti-Tea Party (and thus, really, anti-corporatist) rally on the National Mall last fall, Arianna was there to bus my whole city to the protests on the HuffPo’s dime. I wanted to cover her sweet, aging-resistant face with kisses.

So why is she so hell-bent on not paying writers?

Despite Huffington’s massive financial coup in selling her well-trafficked namesake property to AOL a month ago, HuffPo has a minor image problem on the internet. The site has been lambasted time and time again for a few large issues with which it is associated- one being low-quality content based on search trends, and one being reposting something that is already posted elsewhere (Stewart poked fun at this facet just after the rally buses were announced on his show, and Colbert has even created the “Colbuffington Repost” to repost the reposting.)

Perhaps the most frequently recurring bad press Huffington and the HuffPo is subject to, however, surrounds treatment of the very people who supply the content that enabled such a big cash infusion in February. The site’s big name writers- celebrities, politicians and their ilk- are not the ones driving traffic to the site in numbers enough to support it. It’s an army of unpaid freelancers who better know which topics are currently driving traffic right now- writers the vocally anti-exploitation Huffington laughs at when confronted with the idea that perhaps they should be compensated for the work they put in to power her very-successful blog empire.

When asked late last week at a conference about HuffPo contributors calling for a strike, Huffington pooh-poohed the idea that writers should be paid, and likened the free labor to a high profile television appearance:

She argued that blogging on the Huffington Post is equivalent to going on Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart or the “Today” show to promote their ideas.

And, she said, there are plenty of people willing to take their place if they do.

“The idea of going on strike when no one really notices,” Huffington said. “Go ahead, go on strike.”

The issue is sticky, to be sure, and many hobbyist writers are happy to do decent quality work in exchange for exposure (quick: name a HuffPo writer than isn’t Bill Maher, Sarah Silverman or Russell Simmons.) And I speak from a point of great bias- as you know, I am a full-time blogger myself. To say I frequently reflect upon how lucky I was to receive my first real writing gig from an editor that not only treats me more fairly and compensates me more proportionately than any on-site employer I have had in my nearly 32 years of life is an understatement, and being able to afford to do what I do is a luxury I never take for granted. The fact of the matter remains, though, that if writers are not compensated for their efforts, no one could possibly afford to be a singularly-focused, dedicated writer for the web- a circumstance Huffington seems fine with perpetuating and even helping to establish as a new media model of revenue.

It’s not just Huffington’s writers that suffer from her notion that the amount of time spent culling, researching, editing and adding images to content is not worth any sort of compensation whatsoever- writers everywhere who must turn to the web in increasing numbers to supplement plummeting interest and employment opportunities in old media and print are similarly harmed. To devalue this emerging profession at this critical time is not just harmful to the writers currently locked into being compensated unfairly or just not at all in this horrific job market, it’s setting the stage for grossly under-compensating the people who will provide content for the web in the future-and ensuring that people who wish to pursue this sort of work will never be able to do so as a full-time job.

Given Huffington’s repeated dismissal of the idea she pay her writers even a pittance, it’s unlikely she will revise this stance in the near future. Which is a shame, because it really does serve to undermine her many valid points about the poor treatment of regular working schmucks in this country, and the wealthy people determined to profit off their hard work guiltlessly while pocketing massive profits.

HuffPo writers strike- why Arianna Huffington’s wildly successful media empire is harmful to web workers is a post from: The Inquisitr

I was asked today on Formspring “What are your thoughts on AOL buying Huffington Post?”. The response is informal 1st person, but I thought I’d share it here.

It’s an interesting buy on a couple of fronts.

People are far too quick to criticize AOL’s content strategy based on AOL’s disastrous (at times) past, but there is a future in new media content, and even before the latest wave of acquisitions, AOL has done a good (perhaps not brilliant) job with the old Weblogs Inc properties. I get what they are trying to achieve.

The Huffington Post is a risky acquisition though for a company that has mostly relied on in-house growth, and it’s perhaps not an easy fit into their business vs say TechCrunch slotting in to the existing network of blogs/ new media sites AOL own.

I have a pile of respect for Arianna Huffington and what she’s done with The HuffPost, but likewise the decision to place her in charge of AOL’s content properties is an interesting decision.

Arianna’s strength is that she places people around her who know the business better, and perhaps she’ll do this at AOL, but likewise while she was ideal in getting the attention/ celebrity involvement etc at Huffpost, I don’t think she fully has a grasp of the true blogging style sites that AOL owns because they are very different to what the Huffpost does.

In a broader market sense, the acquisition is a huge positive for the new media industry. We’ve seen plenty of smaller acquisitions over time, with the market starting to recover post GFC with more and more acquisitions. I don’t recall any acquisition in this space as large as the HuffPost deal, and the size of the deal reflects the maturity of the marketplace as a serious part of the media landscape. I’m not suggesting that the deal has made new media come of age (I believe this occurred several years ago) but it might go some way in blunting some of the small clique of critics (all in old media) who continue to take shots at the sector.

Thoughts On The AOL Huffington Post Deal is a post from: The Inquisitr

AOL’s acquisition of The Huffington Post for $315 million has delivered a smorgasbord of commentary this week, and who better to join the fray than our favorite Taiwanese animators.

Highlights: we’ll where do you start. Arianna gets finger waved by Hot Air, Tim Armstrong is in a leaky boat labeled TechCrunch, and Bebo is portrayed as a monkey.

Enjoy:

AOL Huffington Post Acquisition Gets The Taiwanese Animation Treatment is a post from: The Inquisitr

As we reported earlier, AOL has acquired The Huffington Post for $315 million, the largest buy for a stand alone new media property that we can recall, let alone a new media network.

The size of the buy may be unprecedented in the history of new media, but there’s another interesting story to be told and one that might rock the tech blogosphere: TechCrunch was completely cut off from the deal, to the point that they weren’t even given the story under embargo.

The post announcing the news on TechCrunch hit the site at 9:24pm PST, some 23 minutes after the news was broken by (we think) the tech blogosphere’s best journalist Kara Swisher. But it’s more than that: Kara didn’t just break the story, she posted it complete with a video interview with Arianna Huffington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong that had been pre-recorded prior to the announcement, indicating clearly that the Wall Street Journal publication had been given the exclusive over TechCrunch.

But it gets better, because not only was TechCrunch not given the information before the embargo, they weren’t afterward either. At the time of writing, TechCrunch quotes the press release of the deal, and appear to have been completely cut off from anyone in AOL, despite TechCrunch being owned by AOL.

We can only speculate at this time on the why, but with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington picking fights with other AOL properties, in particular Engadget, we can only suggest that perhaps Arrington has fallen out of favor among the AOL hierarchy, or even that he was purposely excluded in an attempt to force him out of the company.

Either way, TechCrunch, a site that has always prided itself on exclusives and breaking news, has now, with this deal, fallen on poorer times.

We’re betting that with Arianna Huffington as his boss, Michael Arrington won’t last the year working for AOL.

Disclosure, in a past life I wrote for TechCrunch

The Ultimate Snub: AOL Buys The Huffington Post and Doesn’t Tell TechCrunch is a post from: The Inquisitr

Wow. Holy Crap.

This has to be some of the biggest deal to hit the blogosphere, over shadowing AOL’s purchase of TechCrunch for a rumored amount of $10 million.

Following the Super Bowl Kara Swisher from All Things D got the scoop of a lifetime as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Arriana Huffington, Editor-in-Chief of Huffington Post, announced that AOL has purchased Huffington Post for the sum of $350 million.

Here is the video of Kara interviewing Armstrong and Huffington about the announcement.

By the way – this means that Arriana Huffington is Michael Arrington’s boss. I’m sure this is going to go over well.

Holy Crap! $315 Million later and AOL buys Huffington Post [VIDEO] is a post from: The Inquisitr

Once more Aol tries to show the world that it is still relevant by teasing us with an iPhone app called Editions; which is being billed as the news app that reads you.

Okay, cutesy taglines aside this is news finding thing and making it pleasing to your eye has been done so calling Editions the Pandora for content isn’t going to make Aol’s offering any more appealing that the two leaders: Flipboard and Pulse.

Granted the method by which it finds your news items is interesting, what with selecting icons for subject matter and then ranking them by importance, but that doesn’t change the fact that it has a lot of catching up to do, and it isn’t even released yet.

As Kit Eaton at Fast Company puts it:

Is AOL late to the game? Yes. But by using sheer muscle and its household brand-name status to attract users to its particular app, could this be a way to bring AOL back to relevance as a player in online news game? Possibly (and, according to this recent profile of CEO Tim Armstrong, that’s where the company is putting down its chips).

In some ways this is characteristic of AOL, which moves like a giant slow-maneuvering supertanker compared to smaller, jauntier competitors. These smaller firms have been able to make good headway in the App Store markets since they appear, within the Store’s confines, similar to bigger name firms who can use PR and real-world marketing to push their products. This is likely to change as the iPad (and Android tablets) becomes a more mainstream product, selling to average consumers rather than early adopters who are keen to embrace new tech. And if AOL steams ahead hard enough, as this promo campaign seems to imply it will, then it may be able to squash the competition. But that’s only true, of course, if it delivers a quality product.

Here is the video put out by Aol to promote (?) the upcoming app, or at least to let you know how they came up with the tagline.

Aol to rescue its relevance with Editions? Good luck with that. is a post from: The Inquisitr

AOL’s recent shopping spree of blogs and content sites may not be over, with a company spokesman saying the company may yet buy more blogs, and even a newspaper.

When asked about it’s intentions, AOL CTO Alexander Gounares said “It is a possibility” earlier in the week, according to PC World.

Gounares went on to say that AOL now plans to expand the content it offers to provide its audience with community news and information.

While the news is not completely unexpected, it’s good news for the booming blog acquisition market that has seen an increasing number of deals in 2010 following the recovery post global financial crisis.

High up the list of acquisition targets, if rumors are to be believed, is social media blog Mashable. The site, which is significantly larger than the now AOL owned TechCrunch, is believed to have previously been in discussions with AOL and another media company in the last 12 months.

AOL Shopping Spree Not Over, May Buy More Blogs is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing that is a constant in the tech industry it is the secretive ways of Apple’s PR machine and the trigger finger of their legal department to go after anyone talking about Apple products before their time – especially bloggers. So this report out of Gawker’s Valleywag that Greg Kumparak, an editor at the recently purchased Techcrunch, was spotted taking a job offer packet from an Apple rep.

The details of the sighting as related by Valleywag’s Ryan Tate:

I’m at a restaurant/brewery called BJ’s in Cupertino, which is pretty much right outside Apple HQ’s front door. About one hour ago, three Apple employees came in. You can always tell because of the badges they wear on those extending cable things… What was weird was who joined them: Greg Kumparak, who writes for TechCrunch. Recognized him from his videos.

I could not hear what was going on, but about 10 minutes into the meal one of the Apple employees handed him a folder with an Apple logo on it. From what i’ve seen before, I’m almost certain this was an offer packet. They spent about 30 minutes talking about it. I could be wrong, but it really looked like Apple was trying to court him for a job.

According to Tate neither TechCrunchAOL nor Kumparak would comment on the report other than the normal wishy-washy type stuff about how everyone is valued and would be missed.

Personally I don’t know why Apple would think it needs to hire anyone when they get all the free adoration and fist-pumping from John Gruber and Kumparak’s colleague MG Siegler.

image courtesy of Valleywag.

RUMOR MILL: TechCrunchAOL editor mulling job offer from Apple is a post from: The Inquisitr

The news is out all over the tech blogosphere – Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL took the stage of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference today to announce that AOL has bought Techcrunch, and all its media properties.

Of course we are getting the typical this is a strategic move for both companies and everything will stay the same moving forward. Ya. Okay.

Anyway there has been no disclosure of who got how much money or if there will be and end of the slaughter of movie analogies but suffice to say Michael Arrington just got himself a nice payday.

Courtesy of The Next Web we have video of the announcement:

The one thing I would be concerned about though is if I worked for CrunchGear since Engadget is a premier AOL property. Chances are some folks are going to be looking for a new job.

NO MORE RUMOR: AOL buys TechCrunch [VIDEO] is a post from: The Inquisitr

This just flashed up on GigaOM and must be placed strongly in the rumor column but Om Malik, who I have a great respect for, is reporting that while still at a delicate stage the deal that would see AOL acquire TechCrunch could see an announcement at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference happening in San Francisco right now.

The deal is at a sensitive stage and might fall apart, but I don’t think so. Sources familiar to both entities say that the announcement is likely to happen onstage at Disrupt, TechCrunch’s flagship conference currently under way in San Francisco.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is likely to make an appearance at the conference, and perhaps that is when the announcement is likely to be made. Michael Arrington was unreachable for comment. AOL has not returned my calls. I still don’t know the terms of the deal, but I will update the post accordingly.

Wow .. wouldn’t that be a hellva way to close out a conference, not to mention a nice pay day.

HOT RUMOR: AOL to buy TechCrunch – in late stages is a post from: The Inquisitr

Remember the English social network called Bebo?

No?

Not surprising since its only real claim to fame was that Aol lost its mind and bought it for $850 back in 2008 and from there returned to an even worse state of obscurity. During Aol’s latest round of trying to figure out what their future is they let the word out that they would be willing to sell Bebo to whoever was interested.

It was also stated that if they couldn’t find a buyer they would shut the service down which according to Mashable won’t happen as a buyer has showed up.

Update: The buyer of Bebo is Criterion Capital Partners, a hedge fund. We’re digging for more details.

—

AOL has found a buyer for struggling social network Bebo, we are hearing from sources close to the deal. The Internet company has been publicly looking for an acquirer for some time, and in April, news leaked that AOL would likely shut down the site if a buyer was not found.

We can all return to not caring now.

Bebo gets sold – no-one cares is a post from: The Inquisitr

What Your Email Adress Says About Your Computer Skills is a post from: The Inquisitr

Digital Sky Technologies, the largest internet firm in Eastern Europe has agreed to buy instant messaging platform ICQ from AOL at a cost of $187.5 million. The platform, while not the most popular in the United States is still considered the most popular in Russian and various other parts of Europe.

AOL recently announced a 58 percent drop in profits and was eager to offload services they didn’t fully support. Digital Sky also owns a stake in various other internet firms, including Facebook app creator Zynga, makers of Farmville.

ICQ was purchased by AOL in 1996 and offers support in 16 languages. According to Electronista:

ICQ has over 32 million unique visitors per month. It has a large presence in Russia, Germany, Czech Republic and Israel, but has lost much of its traction in North America and Europe to AIM and Windows Live.

Does anyone in the U.S. still use ICQ, let us know, just out of curiosity.

Russian Firm Buys ICQ From AOL For Nearly $200 Million is a post from: The Inquisitr