Now its co-founder, Arianna Huffington, is plunging into a campaign to rescue AOL Inc.. As the new editor in chief of AOL’s 56 content sites, a job she began after AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post closed last month, Ms. Huffington is installing her employees, pushing coverage of her pet topics and gutting aspects of AOL’s existing system to do so.
“There was no clear editorial direction,” she said of AOL’s collection of sites, settling into her new office in New York recently. “That’s what we’re bringing to the table now.”

Whether the moves will be enough to transform the struggling Internet icon–and turn significant profits–remain to be seen. AOL has struggled in its years’-long quest to generate a big business off inexpensive digital content. The company says it aiming to make its content business, minus its Patch blog network, profitable this year.

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The beginning of that change came just after the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Mr. Brin says in an interview about the China decision. As the glow of the Olympics faded, he says, the Chinese government began ratcheting up its Web censoring and interfering more with Google’s business. Around that time, he says, the murky rules of doing business in China grew even murkier.

“China was ever-present,” he says. “One out of five meetings I attended had some component that applied to China in a different way than other countries.”

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Many of the moves have been triggered by Facebook Inc., which this week paid current and former employees who participated in a program that let them sell a portion of their shares in the privately held social-networking site. Current workers were allowed to sell up to $1 million worth of Facebook stock or 25 percent of their vested shares, whichever was greater, according to people familiar with the terms.

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One of the highlights of the annual Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Calif., has been Google’s (GOOG) party, known as “Google Dance,” at its Mountain View headquarters. The search giant canceled it this year, however, citing cost-cutting efforts.

“Like most companies are doing these days, we’ve been looking carefully at our expenses and are being more mindful about how we spend our money,” Google spokesman Matt Furman said. “Though we’ve enjoyed hosting the Google Dance in conjunction with SES in past years, we’ve decided not to host it this year.”

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There were also signs the attacks continued Friday after knocking Twitter offline for about two hours and disrupting Facebook’s service Thursday. Twitter Inc. co-founder Biz Stone wrote in a blog post Friday that attacks against Twitter were “ongoing” and “appear to have been geopolitical in motivation.”

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Not so fast. At a joint T-Mobile and Google media event Friday morning, Google’s director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, said Chrome OS isn’t a substitute for mobile operating systems like Android, which have to solve many problems unique to mobile phones, such as managing battery life and ensuring calls don’t drop as a user is moving between cell towers.

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Yahoo has been testing the feature–which allows users to save and take notes on search results they want to revisit–since February, when it first described it in this blog post. Yahoos describe it as a great way to keep track of Web pages related to planning a vacation or renovating a home.

The service works like this: Search Pad detects when users appear to be conducting research-related searches based on patterns in their search queries, such as sequential searches for “ski vacations,” “cheap lift tickets” or “weather Colorado,” for instance.

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But the cascade of companies opening up has created a new question for cash-conscious start-ups: which ones do you build for and which ones do you build for first?

“A lot of start-ups are wrestling with prioritizing their relatively scarce resources,” said Jim Hornthal, a partner at CMEA Capital and chairman of Triporati, a travel destination discovery service.

In the “not-too-distant past” companies could justify tackling most available platforms, said Hornthal, who founded online travel company Preview Travel, which Travelocity bought in 2000. “More likely today, the answer is something less than that,” he said. The decision often boils down to which ones a company “can’t afford not to support.”

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Here’s what we’re hearing: Oprah and three guests–Oprah’s best friend Gayle King, actress Ali Wentworth and actor Mark Consuelos–will interview Mark and show a demo of the show’s new page on Facebook. A celebrity Facebook addict might Skype in to talk up the service as well, although that’s still a little TBD.

Another thing likely to be on the agenda: those nitpicky Facebook etiquette questions and some user stories to back them up.

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The search engine–a distant second to Google (GOOG) in usage–is hoping so. Yahoo (YHOO) announced plans Wednesday to start testing a new research tool that tries to detect when someone is doing a research-related search and offers to save Web pages and notes in a separate document for future recall.

The service, Search Pad, is similar to Google’s new SearchWiki, which allows users to promote and take notes on search results they find useful and view them later.

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I am sure this will be the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers reasoning this group of Web 2.0 folks gives for this odd video effort, doing a lip-synch romp on their group vacation in Cyprus to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and then posting it for all to see on Vimeo.

It is titled: “20 world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.”

Um, kids, here’s a reflection: While you swim in that pricey infinity pool in your luxury villa, Silicon Valley is tanking all over the place. You might want to check your email and see if Sequoia Capital or Ron Conway has cost-cutted you out of a job!

Oh, sorry, BoomTown’s karma is so negative, isn’t I?

But the video gave me flashbacks to heedless-partying-until-the-bomb-fell attitude before the popping of the Web 1.0 bubble. It obviously still burns.

The group rollicking includes Blip.tv’s Mike Hudack, Facebook’s Dave Morin, Drop.io’s Sam Lessin and–well, um, eek, bad idea, awkward!–tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal.

Here is the video:

UPDATE: Apparently, the makers of the video have made it private on Vimeo and blocked it on YouTube, likely due to the reaction to it, but you can see it here.

Well, it’s not. One show, which just did not work, is in no way representative of a trend, any more than the box-office failure of the movie “Snakes on a Plane” meant online marketing and hype was finished.

The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Jessica Vascellaro wrote a great piece today on the subject of online content creation, focusing on social-networking efforts, such as Bebo’s “KateModern,” an original online show from the creators of “lonelygirl15,” as well as stuff being made by MySpace and others.

The goal is to keep users more engaged. More importantly, it is to fight the continued audience attraction to user-generated videos on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG). It dominates the online video market, as you can see from this chart below (click on it to make it larger).

BoomTown has written about the Bebo hit several times (including a video visit to Bebo’s HQ in London last summer and an interview with a “KateModern” producer in November, both seen below), as it represented the right way to start to develop original online content.

And that would not include pulling some failed television pilot out of a drawer, making it on the cheap, cutting it up into shorter segments and slapping it online.

Instead, true success–besides the material actually being good, which should be a given–requires the content to be interactive, pioneer new filming techniques and be made specifically for the medium, using its tools, rather than being shoehorned into it.

“KateModern,” for example, has been changeable by the second by its audience and the creators have moved the action along with startling speed.

But it still has someone professionally producing it. Set in East London, it follows a “troubled young art student named Kate and her three closest friends: an Australian wild-child named Charlie, a young entrepreneur named Tariq and a mischievous computer whiz-kid named Gavin.”

As The Journal’s Vascellaro correctly writes: “Past efforts by Web companies to turn themselves into online versions of television networks have been hampered by the difficulty in changing ingrained consumer habits–while people are happy to watch short video clips from time to time, few until recently saw the Web as a forum to follow regular episodes of series. For online-only shows, weak advertiser interest, subpar production quality and lack of promotional muscle were added hurdles.”

Indeed. But that will change quickly.

Here is our too-long video of the visit to Bebo and the interview with “KateModern” producer Pete Gibbons: