AOL has hired a pair of New York investment bankers, Morgan Stanley and Allen & Co., to manage the sale of its ICQ instant-messaging unit.

Sources familiar with the situation said interest in buying the asset from two major non-U.S. companies prompted execs at the online service to put a process in place for a deal that will likely occur after AOL becomes an independent company in December.

AOL bought ICQ in 1998 for about $400 million–$287 million outright and $125 million in earnouts for the team.

Sources said AOL to looking to recoup $300 million.

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If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Interent telephony that didn’t ever work as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005. Or the ugly lawsuits over it. Or the successful shakedown by its co-founders to get a big chunk back.

You get the idea.

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Silicon Valley legend and now VC Marc Andreessen was making the interview rounds after the settlement between the litigation-addled co-founders of Skype and all the various people they were suing was announced this morning.

In an interview with BoomTown, when asked about the aggressive legal tactics of Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis that resulted in them finally seizing a stake in the Internet telephony giant by suing him and many other Silicon Valley players, Andreessen said:

“We did not take it personally. It’s a clean sheet of paper.”

Well, it is actually a torn, stained and very worn out piece of paper, but bygones!

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The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct in thinking the recipe Microsoft has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.

That would be Apple, of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in, and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.

For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight.

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Perhaps the sides in the ever-escalating war over the Skype deal will work out their differences and settle–which is what should and probably will eventually happen after everyone realizes how stupid all this noisy legal wrangling over the Internet telephony giant is.

But that day is decidedly not today, given a pair of recent big-gun PR hires by parties involved.

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Former Bebo CEO Joanna Shields and Shine Group Chairman and CEO Elisabeth Murdoch have formed a content start-up to produce across media platforms, both online and offline, with a focus on social engagement, according to sources.

The new venture, which does not have a name, is being financially backed by both Shine and Shields.

Based in London, it will invest, develop and partner to create a variety of content offerings that also incorporate interactive and social networking elements.

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Yahoo is set to unveil a major marketing campaign to reset advertiser and consumer perception of the long-troubled company during Advertising Week in New York, which starts a week from tomorrow.

According to numerous sources BoomTown has spoken to about the campaign, Yahoo is–at least with advertisers–going to focus on stressing the size and scale of the Internet giant. With consumers, the Internet giant will push the idea of being a key hub on the Web.

The details of the plan will be made public Tuesday, Sept. 22, at a press conference with senior Yahoo execs, including CEO Carol Bartz.

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Longtime Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse’s appointment to a new job at AOL today is yet another sign of an interesting trend for those keeping score of the comings and goings of top Internet execs.

As anyone who watches the digital space knows by now, this kind of management musical chairs is common and never-ending, although it seems more frantic than ever of late.

In fact, borrowing a quote by IAC/InterActiveCorp chairman and CEO Barry Diller from an onstage interview I did with him at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference, and switching out Hollywood for Silicon Valley: “[It] is a community that’s so inbred, it’s a wonder the children have any teeth.”

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Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse–famous for his controversial “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which correctly chided the Internet giant for becoming so lugubrious several years ago–is taking a job at AOL very similar to the one he left at Yahoo last year.

Garlinghouse, who will remain on the West Coast, will be named president of Internet and mobile communications at AOL, putting him in charge of the New York-based Time Warner online unit’s powerful email and instant-messaging properties, including ICQ and AIM.

He will also be, said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, its “CEO of Silicon Valley for us.”

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What’s next for AOL?

Reviving the “You’ve Got Mail!” motto?

Or: “The Future. Now Available.”–set to music from “The Jetsons”?

What about: “So easy to use, no wonder it’s #1!”

Or maybe, it should just use a nice loooooooong busy signal as its calling card again?

Well, it could happen, now that new CEO Tim Armstrong has fallen prey to the siren call of the AOL brand name, after years of seeing the company wander in the anything-but-the-AOL wilderness.

Thus, he’s decided to try to welcome the prodigal brand back home, even as he prepares to spin it off in November from Time Warner.

Uh-oh.

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After his 100-day VisionQuest to figure out what to do at AOL, Tim Armstrong is in a chattier mood.

So, BoomTown did not waste a New York minute in getting on the horn with him to finally hear his take.

There’s not a lot of new stuff to reveal, of course, beyond what Armstrong has already said about AOL’s new direction.

That would be a spinoff in November, a focus on advertising, content, local, communications and starting a venture unit. But there is also the question of AOL’s ad deal with Google and more.

Here is the interview.

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It’s not often these days that you get any kind of public offering in the market for tech companies–so a lot of people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere are looking at the fall spinoff of AOL very carefully.

That’s because, even though AOL is widely considered to be an also-ran by Silicon Valley, many are very interested in serving on its 10-12 member board.

Thus, AOL, with Time Warner’s top execs’ involvement, sources said, has compiled a list of about 70 possible candidates–picked, suggested and self-nominated–and is now proceeding to vet them and begin the process of asking people to serve.

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BoomTown has had some good leaked internal memos from Yahoo, but I have never enjoyed one quite as much as this one from newly installed Yahoo PR head Eric Brown, who started today.

While it is clear Yahoo has had its troubles in understanding and offering social-networking products to its users, Brown certainly knows how to share.

Yahoo could use some of that DNA!

Here’s his introductory memo to his new troops.

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Adding the final leg of its new strategy to reinvigorate AOL, the Time Warner online unit said it was buying two small local start-ups, Patch Media and Going.

Each acquisition–which focus on hyperlocal community news (Patch) and events (Going)–is small, about $10 million.

Ironically, local has previously been a big arena for AOL, which launched its Digital City unit with great fanfare more than a decade ago. AOL still runs Digital City, as well as its CityGuide listing offering.

But, in a move that will surely be scrutinized, Patch is a company whose principal investor has been AOL’s new CEO Tim Armstrong. AOL declined to say how much he had invested in the company, but sources said it was less than $5 million.

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New Yahoo Marketing head Elisa Steele named a colleague from her former job, NetApp, as SVP of Global Communications at the Internet giant.

Eric Brown was the VP of corporate relations at the data storage company, on whose board Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has also served. Before that, he was at Adaptec.

And, according to Yahoo’s internal memo, Brown likes to eat ice cream in bed while reading a Kindle and surfing the Web.

Scooch over and make some room for BoomTown, Eric!

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