In the ongoing game of Internet exec musical chairs, Greg Coleman (pictured here), who has been a top exec at both Yahoo and AOL, is poised to become president of the Huffington Post, as well as chief revenue officer, several sources said.

The deal for Coleman to come on board at the privately held online news site–which has grown significantly over the last year and just added well-known online media exec Eric Hippeau as CEO–came together only recently.

And it is not clear what the role of current Huffington Post Chief Revenue Officer James Smith will be going forward.

The Coleman hiring is most likely the work of Hippeau, who has known him from Coleman’s days as head of ad sales at Yahoo (YHOO). Hippeau has been on the board of the Internet giant for many years.

Hippeau was also a key player in the $5 million investment in the Huffington Post by SoftBank Capital in 2006.

He has also been a director on its small board, which also includes co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenny Lerer, as well as Oak Investment Partners’ Fred Harman.

Oak recently added $25 million to the funding kitty at the Huffington Post, which is headquartered in New York.

The money will be used to expand the site into the local arena, investigative news, and verticals such as tech, a section set to debut Sept. 21.

It is all being done to build on what has been a strong traffic year for the Huffington Post, which claims it has over 21 million unique monthly visitors.

Nielsen Online has pegged that at the lower figure of 8.9 million, but reported that the Huffington Post was one of the fastest-growing, year-over-year news sites.

Despite that, the site still has not been regularly profitable, despite doubling annual revenue–mostly in advertising–to what some estimate to be about $8 million in 2009.

Presumably, goosing that revenue is what Coleman is being pegged to help do–and he certainly has a lot of online advertising experience, having made stops at a lot of Internet companies in the past few years.

He was head of advertising sales at Yahoo for seven years, after another long stint at Reader’s Digest. Yahoo’s ad business grew strongly under him.

But Coleman ran into Yahoo’s management buzzsaw after trouble hit the company in 2007. He was one of the first in a long line of execs to leave the troubled company, departing in one of its many controversial reorganizations.

He was soon running a Los Angeles-based start-up called NetSeer, which focuses on ad targeting.

He then headed to AOL in February to run its Platform-A division.

But when new management was suddenly put in place by Time Warner (TWX) in the spring, Coleman left after only a few months on the job.

After taking the summer off, several sources said, he has recently been looking at a variety of jobs.

That included MySpace, where former Yahoo colleague Wenda Harris Millard–now with Media Link–was hired recently as an outside consultant to help the News Corp. (NWS) social networking site rejigger its ad business.

The Huffington Post spokesman declined to comment when BoomTown inquired about Coleman’s hiring.

First, a Fast Company piece on the disaster at AOL (this is, for anyone who follows the company, nothing new), called “Dead Man Walking” by David Case.

The phrase, the origins of which is not mentioned in the piece, was applied by pundits to AOL in the early 1990s, when it looked like the Internet was going to make closed online services like AOL obsolete.

It did not turn out that way, of course, as AOL became–for a time, at least–the most powerful player in the digital arena, before imploding right after its disastrous merger with Time Warner (TWX).

After a bit of resurgence under Jon Miller (who was fired for his efforts), AOL is on the ropes again, this article contends–and which BoomTown has been saying for a while now. There are copious examples of this sorry trend in the piece, one more painful than the next.

If you don’t want to slog through it, here’s the money quote:

Eight years removed from the Time Warner merger and more than four years after AOL was expunged from the public company’s official name–an eternity in our evolving Internet age–AOL has been unable to find a way to innovate out of its troubled past. Yes, AOL has been plagued by internecine battles with its corporate parent and by a dial-up subscription-revenue model that could not possibly survive in the modern era. But it has also failed to exploit a wealth of formidable assets, including a ubiquitous brand, millions of regular users, the Web’s dominant instant-messaging service, the iconic MapQuest and Moviefone, the most popular finance site, a top celebrity-gossip site in TMZ, an innovative video search engine in Truveo, and deep television and music offerings… what emerges is a tale of failure on multiple fronts: short-term thinking, bad technology, bungled product development, a dramatic miscalculation of what drives page views on its own site, and a risk-averse culture more prone to imitation than innovation. ‘Pretty much everything we worked on,’ says a former AOL manager, ‘executives pointed to someone else’s product and said, “We want that.” ‘

Second, a piece in the New Yorker by Eric Alterman about the death of newspapers–or, as BoomTown likes to say of this much-trotted out concept: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!

Most interesting, though, is its look at the growth of Arianna Huffington’s online phenom, the Huffington Post (which we wrote about last week here, in fact), as part of the problem for newspapers. (We borrowed this very funny illustration from the article, which kind of says it all.)

And that is basically: They are dull and Arianna is not.

Here’s the money quote:

Though [the] Huffington [Post] has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cellphone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in. Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers–more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid. The overall effect may appear chaotic and confusing, but, [HuffPo Co-Founder Kenny] Lerer argues, ‘this new way of thinking about, and presenting, the news, is transforming news as much as CNN did 30 years ago.’ Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. ‘People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,’ she says. ‘Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.’

Since we have been hugging online for a while now, Arianna just made us feel all warm and fuzzy.