Outside.In will evidently become integrated with AOL’s Patch property – the hyperlocal news service, which sounds about right, considering hyperlocal is what Outside.In is all about.

Outside.In aggregates headlines and blog posts at the hyperlocal level, as well as links to events, local venues, etc.

Outside.In pitches itself as  the leading provider of hyperlocal business solutions for:

• Publishers to easily integrate hyperlocal news and information into sites and apps with Outside.in for Publishers
• Bloggers to get traffic from Outside.in and our growing network of partner sites with Outside.in for Bloggers

• Advertisers to reach local audiences in every neighborhood in the UnitedStates.
• Developers to innovate tomorrow’s local news experiences with our Hyperlocal API

The acquisition follows AOL’s pattern of buying up content-related sites. Other recent acquisitions include The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

According to CrunchBase, Outside.In has raised $14.4 million in funding prior to the acquisition. This has reportedly come from Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, the New York City Investment Fund, Marc Andreesen, Esther Dyson, John Seeley Brown, John Borthwick, George Crowley, etc.

Original Article: AOL is re-launching as a whole new entity. Last week, the company unveiled its new logo for its new brand identity post-Time Warner. According to the Wall Street Journal, AOL is reinventing more than just its logo, however,

AOL will be focusing on producing content, and has even gone so far as developing algorithms to determine what kind of content to produce. Does this process sound familiar? It reminds me of the horizontal content sites discussion our own Mike McDonald recently had with RateItAll President Lawrence Coburn:

In summary, the concept discussed above is that more companies are looking to cover a wider variety of topics, to cash in, as opposed to dominating one vertical. That appears to be what AOL has in mind. WSJ reports:

AOL says its technology also streamlines the process of assigning, editing and publishing stories, and can record data about every story, such as a synopsis, key words and a location, so the stories can be refreshed quickly.

The system is designed to track breaking news and trends and identify the best times to write about seasonal events, such as Halloween or Monday Night Football.

According to the Journal, AOL’s editorial staff of about 500 will be responsible for assigning articles to a network of free-lance writers via Seed.com. Right now they have about 3,000 free-lancers in the bank, but will likely increase that number dramatically. Anyone can submit a story to Seed.com. 

AOL’s technology will supposedly filter stories for plagiarism, profanity, grammar and punctuation. Editors will then have the responsibility of checking facts, editing, and publishing the articles. Writers will be paid based on what AOL’s technology deems their work is worth based on what advertisers would pay for spots that would run with it. It’s all in the algorithm.

This process should provide for an interesting future at AOL, for better or worse. It certainly highlights the fact that they’re not just an Internet Service Provider.

What is your take on AOL’s media publication plans? Smart idea? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> New AOL (or is it Aol.?) Logo Revealed

> AOL and Time Warner Officially Splitting Up

> Former YouTube Monetization Guy Moves To AOL

1. Former Amazon Senior Vice President and CIO Richard Dalzell holds a B.S. in engineering from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. He has also worked as Vice President of the Information Systems Division at Wal-Mart.

2. Karen Dykstra is a partner at Plainfield Asset Management LLC, and has been COO and CFO of Plainfield Direct Inc. since 2006. She received a B.S. in accounting from Rider University and a M.B.A. from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

3. Bill Hambrecht founded and has been Chairman and CEO of WR Hambrecht + Co since 1998. He also co-founded the United Football League, which premiered earlier this month. He is a Princeton graduate.

4. Patricia Mitchell has served as President and CEO of The Paley Center for Media, a global non-profit cultural institution. Before that she was President and CEO of the Public Broadcasting Service. She has served as President of Time Inc. Television and CNN Productions, and was a partner in an independent production company, which focused on women’s programming. Mitchell serves on the board of Sun Microsystems and she holds a B.A. in English/drama and a M.A. in English literature from the University of Georgia.

5. Michael Powell has served as a Senior Advisor to Providence Equity Partners since 2005. Powell is also Chairman of the MK Powell Group and has served as the Chief of Staff of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. Powell has a B.A. in government from the College of William and Mary and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.

6. Fredric Reynolds was with CBS Corporation and its predecessor companies from 1994 until he retired earlier this year. He was Executive Vice President and CFO of CBS Corporation from 2005 to 2009 and President and CEO of the Viacom Television Stations Group. He was also President of the CBS Television Stations Division.

7. James Stengel has been President and CEO of The Jim Stengel Company since 2008. He is also a marketing professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. He has been Global Marketing Officer  at Procter & Gamble and he serves on the board of Motorola. He holds a B.A. from Franklin & Marshall College and a M.B.A. from Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal School of Business.

8. Jim Wiatt served as Chairman and CEO of the William Morris Agency. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California, and is a member of the Board of Councilors of the USC School of Cinematic Arts, former Chairman and current member of the Board of the Los Angeles Police Foundation, and on the Board of Directors of the Music Center of Los Angeles.

"AOL is very fortunate to have an exceptional group of proven leaders to serve on our board of directors. AOL is on a mission to help create the future of media and content and the AOL Board will play a central part in helping us focus the strategy and also operate the company with the highest ethical standards," said AOL CEO and Chairman of the Board Tim Armstrong. "These individuals bring independent judgment and a dedication to building shareholder value, and they will be a tremendous resource for our company, our employees, and our future."

Time Warner plans to have the separation of AOL completed by the end of the year.

The dead projects fall into a number of categories including video, audio, messaging, social, toolbars, desktop, safety, mobile, and email. Check SIA’s article for the complete list.

I wonder how many employees get the axe along with these projects. Layoffs are pretty prevalent these days within the world of online companies, from Yahoo! to Gawker to eBay. Speaking of Yahoo!, there have been rumors floating around of a possible AOL/Yahoo! merger, but they are just that – rumor. It’s hard to see many reasons Yahoo! would want to take on the AOL mess, but some say the deal might even happen this month.

"It’s clear that AOL’s parent company, Time Warner, wants this deal more than ever," says Tech Crunch’s Michael Arrington. "What isn’t clear is whether AOL’s assets will fix any of Yahoo’s problems." I guess AOL and Time Warner don’t consider any of these 50+ projects to be worth enough to sweeten such a deal.

"As far as the list itself: We’re hard-pressed to find projects we think AOL is foolish to be dropping," says SAI’s Peter Kafka. "We’re far from convinced that its newish strategy, which is more or less dependent on the fortunes of its Platform A third-party ad network, will pan out. But we don’t see how keeping any of these items helps the company move forward."

You have to wonder how much wasted time and money went into this massive list of dead projects. I guess it’s not as much as would’ve continued to be wasted had they stayed around. Otherwise they probably wouldn’t be dead.