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 is set to spin itself off in less than a month from corporate owner Time Warner (TWX), and sources said selling off peripheral properties likes ICQ is part of becoming a smaller, more focused company.

Sources added that AOL now wants about $300 million for the property.

ICQ, which was once of the most explosive online communications tools, has lagged since AOL bought its popular software for $287 million in 1998, with another $125 million in earnouts for the team then. It was part of an Tel Aviv, Israel, start-up called Mirabilis.

While ICQ has about 40 million to 50 million unique monthly visitors and is the No. 1 messaging service in Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Israel and other small countries, its has less traction in the U.S. than bigger rival services from Microsoft (MSFT), Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG). In addition, Facebook and Twitter have also become major players in the status-update space.

AOL’s AIM service, in contrast, is quite strong, typically clocking as one of the top instant-messaging properties.

Said one source about the sale of ICQ, which is still based in Israel with about 100 employees and is moderately profitable: “AOL now has to be asking the hard questions.”

Those hard questions include massive layoffs, which BoomTown reported last week will take place soon. AOL then formally acknowledged the cuts, noting in a regulatory filing that Time Warner would take a $200 million charge for them.

Other AOL properties are also likely to be getting the once-over for sale, including its Bebo social networking site, which AOL bought for $850 million in 2008. But that is not imminent.

BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference.

Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday.

U.S. speakers include TED’s Chris Anderson, News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace’s Amit Kapur, Marissa Mayer of Google (GOOG), Linda Avey of 23andMe, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft (MSFT).

And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard, and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

Of course, there’s a passel of bloggers here like BoomTown. I’ll be interviewing Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon (AMZN) and well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.

Besides this conference, Loïc Le Meur has been trying to make a go of it with his San Francisco-based start-up Seesmic, which–like a lot of Web 2.0 companies–has recently made cutbacks. See my video interview below with him in better times, when I visited Seesmic in February.

You can also watch the conference streamed live from its site. More shaky–but Frenchtastic, although no lip-synching extravaganzas for me!–videos from me at Le Web to come, of course.

[Full disclosure: My partner, Google exec Megan Smith (you can read all about it here in detail), is judging a start-up competition at Le Web on Wednesday. But I am trying to find an excuse not to go to that panel, because I always nod off at those things, even if the crazy version of Britney Spears were a judge. Instead, I hopefully will be enjoying the lovely artwork at the Louvre right then.]

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

In the less contentious spirit of DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, two demo conferences taking place simultaneously this week, we’re happy to bring you all the demos we had onstage at D6.

Last, but not least: the G.ho.st Web operating system, which lets users access their desktops from any computer with an Internet connection and is also a joint technology venture between Israelis and Palestinians.

The video of the G.ho.st demo is in two parts.

In part one, CEO Zvi Schreiber shows off the “Global Hosted Operating System,” which is hosted by Amazon, yet another if the many attempts to make cloud computing real.

In part two, Zvi goes over the various features and applications of the G.ho.st product and discusses the business plan and how the Israeli-Palestinian collaboration works.

Tonight, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters had nearly identical stories, noting that Microsoft (MSFT) was interested in buying Yahoo’s (YHOO) search business, which–oh, we bloggers get so touchy when we don’t get even a smidgen of credit, don’t we?–BoomTown speculated was just what the software giant was interested in yesterday.

Wrote BoomTown on Sunday afternoon:

Will Microsoft now just buy Yahoo’s search business instead of the whole company?…The software giant would not give details, but sources at both companies speculated to BoomTown that it involved Microsoft buying Yahoo’s search business and the ad business related to text-based ads, or doing another kind of transaction that would bring the companies closer together to fight Google (GOOG)… Indeed, given that Microsoft, in its long-running war with archrival Google, it wants most of all to grab Yahoo’s search ad business to become a credible No. 2 in the important sector. It could do this via a purchase of those assets or, said others, formulate a deal to be Yahoo’s exclusive search partner.”

And wrote Reuters tonight:

Microsoft Corp. has proposed to buy Yahoo Inc.’s search business and take a minority stake in the Web pioneer, stopping short of a full-out merger, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday… The new deal, if completed, would forge an alliance between the two companies that would represent an alternative means of competing with rival Google Inc., whose ubiquitous search engine has made it an online advertising powerhouse.”

Said The Journal in its new report, after focusing on a simpler Microsoft-Yahoo outsourcing deal Sunday, also tonight:

Microsoft Corp.’s proposed alternative to acquiring Yahoo Inc. would involve a break-up of the Internet giant that people close to Yahoo said is unlikely to win favor with its board. In recent days, Microsoft floated a proposal to acquire Yahoo’s search-advertising business, said people familiar with the matter… Microsoft’s proposal didn’t offer much detail on how it would structure a search-ad deal, the people said. But the plan would likely involve Microsoft’s selling the ads that appear alongside Web-search results delivered to Yahoo users; that could help it gain on Google, the search-ad-market leader.

To be fair, both Reuters’ and The Journal’s reports make such a plan by Microsoft even more definitive and have interesting new details, which are intriguing.

They include:

Both take note of Microsoft’s proposed sale of Yahoo’s Asian assets (worth close to $10 billion, according to the same analyst cited by both reports, who also puts a $21 billion value on Yahoo’s search ad business).

Reuters underscores that billionaire investor Carl Icahn is not pleased with the idea of a partial sale of Yahoo to Microsoft and might side with a Google outsourcing deal, if that came to pass.

And The Journal stressed that Yahoo’s board, which thinks it is all a Microsoft ploy to scotch a possible search-ad outsourcing deal with Google, was also unimpressed with Microsoft’s ideas.

More new news too from Om Malik at GigaOm, who gets hold of yet another Microsoft exec’s memo to the troops.

Yesterday, it was a “leaked” memo from Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s Platforms & Services division.

Today, one from Satya Nadella, its VP of Search. In the memo, Nadella outlines some minor management re-orging, but mostly talks somewhat opaquely about where search is going (no wonder Microsofties are confused as to what direction to take!).

Money quote:

One of the clear themes that emerged from my discussions was the need to build depth of expertise and focus on both the media and technology side and connect the two via common purpose and vision. The other major theme was to create an organization that wherever possible helped drive global and cross network capability, while always enabling and empowering the local aspects of our media business. Lastly it’s imperative that we set up for blurring of the lines between Portal and Search to drive experiences that enable more seamless exploration of content across the search-browse continuum. We want the combined expertise of the team to drive this innovation and also create more scale with vertical efforts.”

A free lunch at AllThingsD.com HQ–come to my house, walk through the kitchen to the cottage in the back–for anyone who can explain this in easy-to-understand words to BoomTown!

Added challenge: Nadella can enter the contest too!

And, finally, don’t miss this report by TechCrunch about former Yahoo Chairman and CEO Terry Semel’s appearance at a conference in Israel on a stellar panel with Google’s Sergey Brin, Yahoo’s current President Sue Decker, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch and well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.

All I can say is ouch at some of the translated highlights.

(Click on the image to make it larger.)

They’re onstage at an event called the Israel Business Conference, put on by an Israeli business publication called Globes.

Walt was interviewed by Vardi. At one point, he noted: “In 10 years, I believe that most readers will be online. I assume that’s already true for my readers. I hope that our paper will be in good shape.”

We do too, but–just in case–don’t miss this amazing online Mossblog that Walt did from Israel called “Peace in the Mideast, With Great Cellphone Coverage.”

My favorite line about Walt’s travels between Israel and Jordan:

In both countries, even in the middle of barely populated stretches of desert, my iPhone had perfect voice coverage from multiple carriers. How come AT&T can’t guarantee the same level of service on the same phone even in the middle of some major American cities?”