The Huffington Post is soon to be under new management, as will most of the news sites under AOL‘s purview, including Engadget, TechCrunch, and more: In a Super Bowl eve shocker, HuffPo and AOL jointly announced that AOL will be acquiring the Huffington Post for $315 million cash some time in the first or second quarter of 2011. Arianna Huffington, who has led the mega-aggregator site as it has ballooned to reach an audience of more than 25 million visitors per month, will become the editor-in-chief of a new thing called the Huffington Post Media Network, which will encompass “all Huffington Post and AOL content, including Engadget, TechCrunch, Moviefone, MapQuest, Black Voices, PopEater, AOL Music, AOL Latino, AutoBlog, Patch, StyleList, and more.”

That’s right: MapQuest is about to become super liberal.

Get ready to haz a sad: Ken Auletta of The New Yorker revealed in an article profiling AOL that the company makes 60 percent of its profits through people, mostly elderly people, who believe they need to pay for a monthly subscription to go online and check their email. Is this a scam, or just a case of witholding information — or in this case, lying?

Back in the day [read: the '90s], free AOL installation CDs were virtually inescapable, thanks to AOL’s aggressive use of unsolicited direct mailing and the company’s efforts to get them in free bins at stores and public places everywhere. Proclaiming some number of free hours of cutting-edge dial-up subscription service, a good number of them would wind up in the trash or tossed around as makeshift Frisbees.

But for all of the annoyances caused by these disks, former AOL executives say they did what they were supposed to do: Give the company a huge install base, such that even today, 40 percent of AOL’s revenue comes from dial-up subscriptions. How much did it cost to get there?

In light of AOL’s headline-making purchase of TechCrunch and its efforts to rebrand as an online media company, an interesting note about the company’s business as it currently stands: 40% of AOL’s revenue still comes from selling dial-up Internet subscriptions. To whom, we have no idea.

WSJ:

While the company continues to invest in its new strategy, its business hasn’t moved much beyond its old one: More than 40% of its revenue still comes from selling dial-up Internet service and related subscription products, the legacy business it has been trying to shed for years.

…

Advertisers like the idea of making AOL a go-to place for buzzworthy news and entertainment. But they aren’t convinced it will work.

Wow. The rumors are true: AOL is buying TechCrunch, and it’s going down at TechCrunch Disrupt right now, with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong taking the stage to announce the purchase.

Update: A few more relevant details: Arrington will be staying onboard for three more years, and TechCrunch has signed an agreement guaranteeing what they say is complete editorial freedom — Arrington said that “if someone releases leaked AOL documents to us, we can publish them with complete freedom.”

Contrary to Robert Scoble’s surmise earlier today that the sale would likely have to be “between $50 million and $75 million,” partly as a means of Arrington sticking it to longtime rival Jason Calacanis, who sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL for $25 million, TBI reports based on the word of a “second-hand source” that the deal will only be worth about $25 million, which would be low based on TechCrunch’s yearly revenue of $10 million; however, they note that “It’s possible that the $25 million is just an initial payment and that the price could include an earn-out for excellent performance.”

Update2: CNBC is now reporting that the price was $40 million.

Update3: Quite a day for AOL: They’ve also announced that they’re acquiring Thing Labs (maker of Brizzly) in addition to TechCrunch and their earlier purchase of 5min Media.

Here’s the press release announcing the purchase: (yoinked from MediaMemo)

Maps finally join the open source movement: Starting with Blighty and later heading to the United States, AOL‘s MapQuest is unrolling an open source mapping project today that draws on free and editable map data from around the world. The initiative, named “MapQuest Open,” will use the new design for MapQuest, its beta mode unveiled last week.

OpenStreetMap, an Wiki community of cartographers, will provide the data. What’s more, AOL has announced it will be investing $1 million to encourage open source mapping in the U.S. As the OpenStreetMap site explains, “because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, [it holds] back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.”

Um, so did you know this? Apparently ICQ‘s heyday didn’t end millions of years ago. According to an article from CY.TALK, senior U.S. officials are alarmed over the sale of the instant messaging service to a Russian company, fearing they will lose tabs on the criminal underworld.

ICQ, which is one of the largest IM services of its kind, is especially popular in Russia and Eastern Europe. The implications are clear: If we don’t do something about it, our world will soon be overrun by guys straight out of Eastern Promises.

(Before we dig too far into this, you may want to visit the 56k Modem Emulator, to establish the proper sonic mood. Ah, that beloved squeal.)

A colleague (who is handsome and wise) recently discovered an old Media Metrix report delineating “World Wide Web Audience Ratings” for December 1998. It’s a remarkable study, categorizing thousands of sites and conglomerated web companies.

This thing is like finding election results from 1880; like coming across the original Billboard music chart. It looks familiar, like you should know all of the component elements, but it’s unrecognizable. As though they’re all brands made up for movies.

The Rankings
Home and Work, Combined
We’ll start where the report starts – at those sites most popular when combining home and work visits. (Please see above diagram for clarification.) Before I list them, I want you to try and think up what the top fifty websites were in 1998. Got it?

Yeah, you’re wrong:

A ReadWriteWeb article on Facebook’s ambitions of becoming “your one true login” was the top Google search result for “Facebook login” for a while yesterday, possibly because Facebook’s constant redesigns caused it to take a hit with the search engines.

The result? Thousands of people Googling “facebook login” thought that ReadWriteWeb was, in fact, the new Facebook login page, and hundreds left comments using (what else) Facebook Connect.

Here are just a few: