It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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In yet another appointment of an exec close to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, Patch Media CEO Jon Brod has taken over the new venture arm of the Time Warner online unit.

He ran Patch for Armstrong and was president and COO of Polar Capital Group, Armstrong’s private investment company, which is focused on the media, technology and sports sectors.

Now Brod will helm AOL Ventures, a new unit of AOL that Armstrong created as part of a larger new strategy to invest in new things, and he will manage a portfolio of some of its more difficult recent acquisitions.

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Microsoft does not have a secret plot to buy Yahoo.

Maybe Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer should be hovering in the wings, like a digital Simon Legree ready to pounce again on poor Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

But he’s not.

And still the hopeful, the suspicious and, most of all, the beaten down Yahoo shareholders continue to jump on any utterance from the software giant, even woefully mistranslating interviews with its top execs, to make it so.

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Everybody remain calm.

While it might have looked like it was the rapture for major Internet players yesterday–what with everyone and his mother getting sucked up into the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover tussle and disappearing into the ether of confusion that now reigns over the situation–it is best to keep moving toward the light of harsh reality for illumination.

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Gone, Tim Tuttle of Truveo. Gone, the Birches of Bebo. Gone, Dave Morgan of Tacoda. Gone, many Quigos.
One of the more interesting little problems that AOL has had over the last few years, in regards to its acquisition of hot Internet companies, has been that it is situated deep in the bowels of the Time [...]

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Yesterday, newly minted Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (pictured here) finally acknowledged the Web equivalent of the grass is green and the sky is blue related to its AOL unit.
His move–separating the dying Internet-access business from its much more robust online ad business–was long in coming, and it has been perplexing as to why it [...]

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AOL’s video search engine Truveo (which we posted on here–see the video with CEO Tim Tuttle below) made a list of the top 10 viral videos for 2007.
Of course, the inane answers of Miss Teen South Carolina made the top of the list.

And, however did we miss this gem at No. 4?–the “Paris [...]

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As expected, from a story we broke in BoomTown more than a week ago, AOL confirmed it has bought the Israeli content-targeting ad network Quigo.
The sale price, said sources, was a lofty $300 million, around what Yahoo paid for data analytics ad network BlueLithium in September.
Well, it’s probably a good thing for AOL as it [...]

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Yesterday I posted a short piece on the debut of AOL’s Truveo video-search site, which I like a lot.
It is a new consumer destination site, which is aiming to go head-to-head with other video-search sites, like Google’s, Yahoo’s and Blinkx’s. Until now, Truveo has been providing white-label video search to big sites like those of [...]

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It’s not often that AOL can actually be called innovative these days, but perusing its Truveo video-search site, which will roll out a new consumer destination site today, I might have to reconsider.
I will post a video later today on my visit to the San Francisco-based company, where I talked to its CEO and Co-Founder [...]

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