The glimpse AOL (NYSE: TWX) offered late Sunday night of its new branding campaign looked more like icons for AIM, not a branding campaign for a company on the verge of reinvention. That’s because what we’re seeing now is only a teaser, as AOL CEO Tim Armstrong told paidContent in a rare evening interview.

For instance, if you just glance at the new AOL logo— ‘Aol.’ —about all the lowercase lettering suggests is a complete break with the notion of AOL as acronym and the period at the end is just that. But to the man leading AOL down the homestretch to the Dec. 9 spinoff from Time Warner, it’s “Aol Dot.” The dot is a pivot point that shows AOL plus something else—Aol.Music, Aol.Asylum, Aol.MapQuest. Or hundreds of something elses. It’s also a sign that AOL is part of the web now, not on its own. Whether others will see what he does when the full campaign is unveiled is about as easy to predict as the stock price when the market closes on AOL’s first day back. Armstrong is betting they will. He explains:

Terra Firma may have written off 90 percent of its investment in the label after Citigroup refused to ignore about half the debt it provided for the deal, but - slowly, slowly - EMI Group is turning a corner.

Full-year earnings to March 31, 2009, are up 7.4 percent to £1.563 billion ($2.58 billion)...

Another big, albeit much more down to earth bet on the online book rental market from VCs. Online book rental service BookRenter is announcing it has brought in $6 million in a first round, less than a week after rival service Chegg raised $57 million in its fourth round of funding. Both companies let college students rent textbooks, so they don’t have to buy them. A third competitor in the booming market is Campus Book Rentals.

Although the latest newspaper circ numbers showed continued declines, changes to the way the Audit Bureau of Circulations counts electronic subscribers have obscured just how many readers the industry is losing. For instance, until this year, newspapers that sold print/digital subscriptions in a single package could only count them once, Under new rules set by the ABC back in April, individuals who got the bundled subscription deals could be counted twice—and, according to AP, the results were glossier in some cases. 

AOL (NYSE: TWX) just released its new branding look—one consistent typography showing “Aol” with different literally hundreds of “reveals” from various artists. We’re only seeing a snapshot; the new identity fully debuts when AOL rings the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange Dec. 10. (Images here and after the jump with the release.) For Running Man devotees, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong assures paidContent the icon, which turned 13 this year, isn’t having his number retired. “The running man is going to be around the brand. He’s a huge part of the culture ... We’re setting the running man loose.” He says the figure will be popping up in some surprising places over the next couple of years. More from that interview.

The next battle in the search wars could be over access to news content. The FT reports that Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)—which has made increasing the market share of its Bing search engine its top online priority—has reached out to “big online publishers” in order to get them to pull their sites from Google (NSDQ: GOOG). Among the parties currently in discussions with Microsoft is News Corp. (NYSE: NWS), which has very loudly threatened to block search engines from crawling the content of its newspapers.

—Atlantic Media: Former U.S. editor of Reuters.com Adam Pasick will be heading up the new digital media brand from The Atlantic publishing group, launching in “early 2010.” Along with being U.S. editor, Pasick was also the bureau chief of Reuters (NYSE: TRI) Second Life, editor of Reuters Deals and editorial representative of Reuters Labs.

—Tribal Fusion: Tim Brown is the new European General Manager for the digital-marketing solution firm. He will be in charge of making sure all Tribal Fusion products are compliant with European customer needs.

Jason Goldberg, the chief product officer of Xing, the European biz social network that Burda just bought a big stake in, is leaving the company with this deal, about 12 months after his social news startup Socialmedian was sold to the Germany-headquartered company. The Socialmedian sale price at that point was about $4 million in cash and stock, and a performance-based earn-out valued at between €500,000 and €2.5 million, payable over three years, which likely means Goldberg didn’t get much out of the earnout, understandable in a horrible economy like this. He tells me: “I am leaving amicably and as a shareholder,” which means some cash-out opportunities ahead. Goldberg will be moving back from Hamburg, Germany to New York City, where he was previously based. Prior to Socialmedian, he was the controversial co-founder and CEO of the well-funded jobs site Jobster.

Part of the joy of following Bill Simmons on Twitter is the feeling that he doesn’t hold back—that, plus not only he can be snarky as all get out when the occasion demands, his tweets, snarky or not, are usually spot on. (He has one of the highest “repeat out loud” ratings in our house.) But The Sports Guy went a tweet or two too far under the sports net’s social media guidelines, and is now serving a two-week Twitter time out. It’s not a full suspension, more like the half-game version Florida’s Urban Meyer tried to give a college football player earlier this season for almost gouging out an opponent’s eyes. Simmons is allowed to tweet about his new book and accompanying book tour. 

No sale yet for Nielsen Business Media (NBM) but most of it is about two weeks away from being acquired by a consortium led by James Finkelstein’s News Communications, paidContent has learned from multiple sources. We have also learned that Lachlan Murdoch—yes, that Lachlan Murdoch— is considering joining the consortium. The parts being sold are the print and online, while events will be retained by Nielsen. Also, the sale doesn’t include all international territories. Magazines in the stable include some storied ones like Billboard, Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, Mediaweek, Brandweek, Editor & Publisher; the full list of brands here. Out of the media/entertainment properties, THR and the A/M/B combine are hemorrhaging money, but surprisingly, considering the shape of the music industry, Billboard’s revenues have held up, our sources says, primarily as a result of its diversification beyond the main print brand and licensing revenues. The bank representing Nielsen is Quayle Munro, led by John Wickersham—the former president and CEO of NBM.

MySpace Music has now finalized a global licensing deal with the labels represented by Merlin, according to details tipped Friday to Digital Music News.  Both companies confirmed the relationship, thanks to resolution on a major sticking point related to equity. MySpace noted that Merlin - and other indies - are now structured to “benefit from the financial growth of MySpace Music” as part of a “growth participation plan,” the exact terms were not shared.

For Merlin, the deal includes participation in MySpace Music Board of Directors meetings, though specifics on Merlin’s equity stakes were also withheld.  The companies are planning an official announcement on Tuesday, and more details on the financial terms and stakes are likely to emerge next week.

Sony keeps flip-flopping over adding music downloads to the PlayStation Network (PSN). After scrapping plans to add a music store to the gaming network—complete with the ability for gamers to port tracks to the handheld PSP—comes news that the company will indeed expand the PSN into a full digital download store, with music, books, as well as mobile apps available. It has been tentatively (and blandly) named the “Sony Online Service.”