We spoke with AOL's Entertainment Practice Head Debbie Menin at Digital Hollywood Spring 2011 last week at the Ritz in Marina del Rey. We discussed the different ways in which consumers are using social media to inform purchases and decisions and how that in turn is informing the advertising industry. more ›

Want to blog about your neighborhood? Now might be your big chance. Word on the street (or...well...in Forbes) is that Patch.com, hyperlocal news site extraordinaire, is looking to hire 8,000 writers within the next eight days. Writers won't be paid, which isn't too surprising considering the fact that one Ariana Huffington is now at the helm of AOL's online content. more ›

Even bloggers can get caught up in shady corporate bullshit. Here's a little yarn for you: Alexia Tsotsis, former LA Weekly writer, recently started blogging at TechCrunch, a blog about technology start-ups that's owned by AOL. This past week, Tsotsis was at SXSW when someone from Moviefone - also owned by AOL - gave her the chance to interview Jake Gyllenhaal, who stars in Summit's new movie "The Source Code." more ›

Huffington, once a vocal Republican and ex-wife of former GOP Congressman Michael Huffington is now well-established as a beacon of the progressive left. Apparently too much to handle for Politics Daily columnist Matt Lewis became the first AOL employee to quit publicly in protest of the deal. more ›

Stepping up its ongoing efforts to regain relevance in a post-dialup world, AOL will acquire Huffington Post for $315 million. As part of the deal, Arianna Huffington will become Editor-in-Chief for all properties of AOL's rapidly expanding content empire, including the increasingly ubiquitous Patch.com hyperlocal news network. Top sites that will be added to Huffington's editorial domain include TechCrunch, Mapquest, Moviefone and the surviving blogs of the Weblogs, Inc. network (including Endgadget, TV Squad, PopEater and Joystiq), acquired by AOL/Time Warner in 2005. Will the internet never be the same again? more ›

AOL's brand of local news websites are growing faster than ever. Just last week, LAist posted about two new Patches in the San Gabriel Valley and today are two more in North Hollywood/Toluca Lake and in Monrovia. more ›

Love 'em or hate 'em, AOL's push for hyper local news took two more steps this week in Southern California. More specifically, Patch.com launched websites in the unincorporated community of Altadena and the city of South Pasadena. Behind the two sites are editors with masters degrees in journalism. more ›

Patch, the AOL-owned hyper-local neighborhood news website, is springing up in communities all over the Los Angeles region, but not all communities are handing out a warm welcome. Over at Yo! Venice! writer Bret bemoans that the new Venice news site is run by someone who does not live in the community, but rather Hollywood. He compares the portal to Walmart, which, interestingly enough, is the same comparison Timothy Rutt of Altadenablog makes in an interview with LA Weekly in a story today. more ›

Four neighborhoods this month became the first within Los Angeles city limits to become home for AOL's hyper-local initiative called Patch, which are those community news sites that have been popping this year in surrounding cities like West Hollywood, Calabasas and Redondo Beach. more ›

AOL is launching a new neighborhood news service called Patch. It's hyper-local to the core, as they just hired a full time editor to live and breath Manhattan Beach day in, day out. Soon they'll launch a Redondo Beach version and so on, apparently. This type of reporting is much needed and if successful like Eric Richardson's blogdowntown, where city council agendas are scrutinized and development news is broke, this will be exciting. Kevin Roderick at LA Observed, however, has a note of caution: "the difficult trick on coverage of small cities is to be knowledgeable without becoming a tool of the city officials, politicians and community leaders who care more about favorable coverage and avoidance of controversy than about accuracy or independence." Currently a feature piece on the MB portal is a piece about parking meter rate hikes. more ›

Where It's At is a new mapping site (run by AOL it seems, and sponsored quite visibly by Visa) that plots points of Pop Culture interest. They take user-suggested locales and plot them, complete with descriptions, images, and relevant links. You can look at maps that show just particular areas, like Los Angeles, or the most plentiful one to date, "Movie Magic." more ›

The twice-yearly, geek-tastic unconference for technologists, gamers, industry-folk, and Internet lovers of all stripes is again upon us. BarCampLA is in its fifth iteration and thanks to a collaborative effort fronted by Jason Cosper and Crystal Williams (and dozens of sponsors), it's shaping up to be the best BarCamp evar. more ›

Some interesting tech-related news from around the web this week. • Imitation may be a form of flattery (the sincerest kind, so they say) but AOL, I think you might have taken it a bit too far. • AT&T Chief Edward "Moneybags" Whitacre is retiring. His going away present? $158.5 Million. Not a bad present. I bet he won't try to return it. • Apple issues a fix for the battery issues that plague... more ›

So Mr. Editor wasn't in the mood to be on this rock spanking internet show-thing, but yours truly took the bait. The DL on AOL. See you think it stands for down low -- but it stands for downloaded. The internet can be clever and quick on its toes that way. Ah, that AOL. Their music channel is called Spinner and the DL is one of five links they have to different music reviews and music news. more ›

LAist has been around the block. And we know people. We have friends in high places and we have some friends who are simply high. Somewhere in between we have discovered what we could safely assume is something close to "the truth". One of our friends showed us an unedited list of a very popular search engine and we were somewhat surprised to see "ass" pretty close to the most searched-for term. Ass? In... more ›

The first question should be, "who the hell still uses AOL?" With DSL being advertised for $20 or less for new users, and cable providers doing more to use that fat pipe, LAist finds very little sympathy for modern-day web surfers who pay the Virginia company $28 a month for the wonders of dial-up. And we have even less sympathy for those whose social security numbers ended up on an AOL-generated web site recently... more ›