The official theme of AOL, the fast-fading internet giant, is to "beat the internet," CEO Tim Armstrong confirms in an internal memo. And by "beat" he apparently means "pummel into a bloody whimpering mess."

When the founders of AOL and eBay retired, they planned a life of philanthropy. They were so busy saving the world they apparently didn't notice their own workers were being brutalized.

AOL just sold ICQ for at least $100 million less than it paid, cementing the brand's infamous association with the absolute worst deals in internet history. To cut a deal with the internet conglomerate is to invite epic disaster.

When AOL paid $850 million for Bebo two years ago, the deal immediately smelled rotten. Now it's looking downright putrid: AOL might write the social network off entirely.

Everyone likes AOL CEO Tim Armstrong. But they're not sure he has any clue what he's doing. Especially now that yet another senior AOL content executive—Mike Porath, editor of AOL News—is headed out the door.

Set aside for a moment the debate over whether Aol is a freelancer sweatshop. The real problem at the internet company is naive editors. Or at least, that's what the guy in charge of Aol says.

In your energizing Wednesday media column: ad spending is rising towards an inevitable deadly explosion, Yahoo hires some good writers, AOL enters the food blog wars, and a Cleveland reporter is a wanted man.

AOL hired an army of underemployed music lovers to interview bands at South by Southwest. But the citizen journalists, paid $50 per story, are missing their deadlines, so AOL sent a panicked mass email (below).

Former Star editor Bonnie Fuller left the celeb magazine world to start a wondrous vapid celeb website. Now, WWD says former Us Weekly editor Janice Min is working on a website of her own. Can she avoid post-magazine online doom?

The chief of AOL's Seed is trying to get his former New York Times colleagues to join his computer-statistics-driven freelancer army. In the email below, Timesmen are urged to defect and "reinvent the field" of journalism, since "jobs are scarce."

With great power comes great responsibility. But AOL's media borg Seed.com can't stop its horde of desperate underemployed journalists from mobbing story subjects, like the angry woman who heard from seven Seed writers in six days. Frightening.

AOL just announced its first quarterly results since spinning off from Time Warner. Sure, profit was a pathetic $1.4 million, but the dial-up provider's financial pathetic-ness is growing more slowly than ever. Full memo:

AOL will begin a much-anticipated mass layoff round today, the head of HR wrote to staff. Fired workers — an estimated 1,400 of them — will largely be leaving on Wednesday. Then the internet conglomerate can hire in India. AOL is planing to expand its technical staff in South Asia, according to briefings within the company earlier this month. But first the company, in the midst of a major restructuring under CEO Tim Armstrong, must make major cuts stateside. By spreading the cuts among AOL's offices, the company will avoid having to give costly, lengthy firing notices under the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification act. Let's hear it for the bottom line.

Next week will bring a much-anticipated "nuclear" round of layoffs to AOL, insiders believe, part of an internal shift the CEO is describing as a cultural revolution. Indeed, some jobs are literally going to another culture, offshore, we hear.

Responding to rumors he might sell his tech blog to AOL, Mashable CEO/babe magnet Pete Cashmore says he's gone to first or second base with some company, and flirted with others, but isn't about to close a deal.

If AOL buys Mashable — or just sells the monster tech blog's ads — it will be banking less on journalism than on the site's network of members, Twitter fans and party groupies. Banking, that is, on Pete Cashmore's hotness.

AOL is interested in buying the world's largest tech blog, Mashable, we hear from a source at the internet conglomerate. And in fact the two sides have been talking, people outside AOL have whispered to one another, and to us.

• The cover of Vanity Fair's February issue will likely turn plenty of heads: It features a barechested Tiger Woods pumping iron. The photo by Annie Leibovitz was taken before the Woods sex scandal unfolded, however. [VF]
• Is New York Post editor Col Allan retiring? That's the rumor, although Allan says it's just "wishful thinking" on the part of the Daily News. [NYM, Politico]
• Cable spats: Fox and Time Warner reached a deal in their dispute on Friday. But Cablevision customers are still without the Food Network and HGTV.
• Dick Clark has clearly seen better days, but ABC's NYE telecast was No. 1 on Thursday night. NBC's Carson Daly-hosted program came in No. 2. [Variety]
• Disgraced ex-Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich will be one of the "stars" on the next season of Celebrity Apprentice, you'll be thrilled to hear. [UPI]
• Ten years after he presided over the merger of Time Warner and AOL, Jerry Levin now says it was all a big mistake and he's really, really sorry. [THR]
• Good news! The ad market for newspapers, magazines is looking up. [WSJ]
• Arianna Huffington and Glamour's Cindi Leive plan to sleep a lot in '10. [HP]
• Avatar was once again No. 1 at the box office this weekend. The film has now grossed more than $1 billion around the world since it was released. [THR]

We are trying to bring down Seed, the AOL News Borg created to destroy editorial on the internet, one poem at a time. Today the machine asks, "What Does It Mean to Square Something?" We try to answer.

Seed, the AOL News Borg that generates story ideas based on the things that people are looking for on search engines, is up and running. We've had a look at their assignments and there is only one appropriate response: poetry.