It made perfect sense that Tim Armstong's AOL would purchase HuffPo for $315MM. HuffPo is so expensive to run, it had to have a buyer, and AOL is such a relentless chewer-up of talent and shredder of acquired companies that it had to have powerful new products to put ads on.  In other words, a match made in Heaven.

But I think Arianna Huffington is shrewd enough to know that the deal is better for AOL--and hopefully, for her investors and staff--than it is for HuffPo per se. While moving onto the AOL backend will save thousands in hosting costs, and a unified ad sales team will put AOL almost back to the glory days of being a must-buy service in terms of additional ad revenue,, that doesn't mean HuffPo is going to be a better service because of this deal.  It's more likely that AOL corporate will  suck up Huffington's attention and focus after the sale in a way that takes away from her business and that, a year from now, HuffPo will be diminished while other competitors--some of them, like Salon, also up for sale, are getting far more attenton and press.

Of course, on the other hand, perhaps Ariana Huffington is the editor Tim Armstrong has always dreamed of, the one who an make his revenue visions based on strong products and hit stories come true.

It seems like only a year ago that jason goldberg moved to New York and engaged a team of Indian developers to build out socialmedian, a community-focused aggregrator & reader. I remember being both impressed and thrilled by Jason's entreprenurial  drive, focus on getting the product right, and seeking lots of user feedback at every stage. His move from CEO of Jobster to this new thing--and the focus with which he made it happen--was also impressive.

And now, the exit. Jason says that, socialmedian's been acquired by German company XING--with Goldberg going to Germany to head a new product division of their business (I'd hire him too--he's totally proven he can execute!). Jason says  In this new role, in addition to strengthening and enhancing the socialmedian service, I will also be responsible for managing global partnerships for application developers and content providers to connect with the XING network"

Congrats, Jason, you are inspiring.

News today that SixApart, the blogging/CMS/publishing tools company that powers this blog, has acquired Pownce, the twitter-like microblogging service run by Leah Culver and others and launched almost a year ago.

It's always glorious to hear that a hard-working start-up has gotten enough success to be acquired, but this acquisition is especially interesting because it shows how closely real-time presence and lifestreaming tools and CMS platforms are moving together, as web publishing becomes a full lifestream of community, real-time engagement and historical archives of data (video, pictures, text).

As with Rael Dornfest, this is clearly a talent and tools acquisition, but with this acquisition comes the "advisory services" of Digg's Kevin Rose and Dan Burka. In his acquisition.welcome post, CEO Chris Alden notes his plans to marry Vox and Pownce; you can see the vox blogs of Leah and Mike Malone have been up for 5 whole seconds. Community manager Ariel Waldman also has a brand spankin new Vox blog, so I'd say that signals intent to bring some of the Pownce cool kids sass into the now snooz-ier than planned Vox brand.

Was this a "we acquired your debt and paid back your investors" acquisition, or a we paid cash on the barrel for you deal? I'd vote for the former, but only those involved know.

Guess Leah and Mike are now employees once more..but for how long?