Mernit’s points:

• This is probably a good deal — for AOL. “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.”
• Is BlogHer next? “BlogHer fits [AOL CEO Tim] Armstrong’s model of running a series of great niche sites. And while AOL and HuffPot are good on news and gossip, they don’t have a smart Mom’s network, per se, which is one place where BlogHer has taken control of the 25-60 female audience. …But most of all, an attempt to acquire BlogHer would be good business.  If Armstrong and AOL want to acquire not only great brands but strong teams, they can’t do better.”

We’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, from my perspective, I’d like to hope that now that Arianna Huffington is the new boss of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, maybe he might start curbing his tendency to be such a defensive jerk regarding the underrepresentation of women in tech, and on panels at tech conferences.

Yeah, I know….  dream on…

You can upload your dataset to Many Eyes and apply various visualization types to that data — kind of like using filters on images in Photoshop. You can customize your display.

Many Eyes is a useful tool not just for publishing information, but also for analyzing information to see what the story might be, or where the anomalies are.

Here’s an interactive visualization I just created:

Earlier on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits I wrote about how you can use some Many Eyes tools like word tree for document analysis.

Many Eyes meet the New York Times: On Oct. 27 NYTimes.com launched its Visualization Lab, where anyone can create and share visual representations of selected datasets and information used by Times reporters.

Many Eyes is just one of the projects from IBM’s Visual Communication Lab.