Its no surprise to anyone that Huffington Post and Aol News will be merging, but what surprised us, is that in the days to come, Aol News will no longer be producing any original content, and will instead be entirely serviced by Huffington Post. Since Aol CEO Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington jointly announced plans [...]

First PopEater, then the world. Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, who recently sold the brand to Aol for $315 million, is taking steps to expand the Huffington Post beyond the U.S.

The aftermath of AOL’s $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post has–as expected–resulted in layoffs for more than 200 AOL employees in the U.S., according to TechCrunch. The HuffPo deal, which closed on Monday, means Aol is shedding employees across various properties, the majority of them in editorial.

Worldwide, the layoffs total about 1,000–the majority (about 750 workers) in India, where TechCrunch reports 600 employees will be fired, and another 150 shifted into contractor’s roles.

Michael Arrington took to TechCrunch (which, you may recall, was acquired by Aol late last year) to discuss a memo from Aol CEO Tim Armstrong on changes facing the company in the wake of its recent, and much-publicized, acquisition of Arianna Huffington‘s Huffington Post. As past of the move, Huffington will oversee editorial across several of Aol’s blogs.

The memo comes on the heels Aol’s former president media David Eun announcing that he is resigning from the company, which Armstrong chalks up to the realization that “there wasn’t a fit for what he is looking for at this point in his career.”

Surveying the media landscape in the aftermath of yesterday’s $315 million deal bringing the Huffington Post to Aol, the Los Angeles Times‘ Tim Rutten has concluded journalism is “the loser.” Using plenty of colorful images (“To grasp the Huffington Post’s business model, picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.”), Rutten describes the merger as a means to “push more journalists more deeply into the tragically expanding low-wage sector of our increasingly brutal economy.”

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.

More details TK. In the meantime, here’s the press release announcing the purchase: (yoinked from MediaMemo)

Today Aol Daily Finance reporter Jeff Bercovici attacked Mediaite for the way we aggregate, curate and publish video clips from various television networks. But it seems that Aol engages in a far more egregious practice: running their own video advertisements in front of third-party video content; a big no-no in the world of Internet video aggregation. A high level source at one cable news network, whose videos Aol regularly uses, tells us that there is “no licensing agreement in place.”

The year 2009 had many media bright spots, break-out stars, dominating networks and game-changing technologies. The Mediaite 50 collects the finest, most exemplary innovators and influencers of the year, defining a media moment in time and setting the agenda as we move forward. See the full list after the jump:

Edgy? Dumb? Clever? AOL revealed a half-dozen new logos yesterday in anticipation of its split with Time Warner at the end of the year, and they present a sharp departure from the running man and Illuminati triangle of the company’s dialup days. Among the changes: lowercase letters, whimsical graphics and doodles, and, most importantly, a dot at the end. Why is the dot so important?

The NY Times’ David Carr writes about AOL’s transformation from gated-community ISP to content powerhouse. And while AOL deserves a ton of credit for righting a ship that appeared destined to to sink, a closer look at how the Internet giant gets its massive traffic numbers actually belies the true value of both its content and traffic. Is all this focus on content part of a larger communications strategy in advance of Time Warner’s plans to spin-off AOL as a separate company?