According to WSJ.com AOL has finally confirmed it is to cut up to 5,000 jobs ,or a quarter of its global work force, within six months as the company restructures its business to draw more online advertising dollars.

The announcement, which was well trailled, came a day after the Time Warner Inc. unit said it would no longer charge high-speed Internet customers for email and other services.

An unknown number of European employees will still have jobs but with a different company as AOL looks to shed its Internet access businesses in France, Germany and the U.K. AOL currently has 3,000 access employees in Europe.”

Robert Scoble, the ex-Microsoft blogger, has an thought-provoking piece on “gestures” which I translate as clues in the text which could allow sites to personalise in a passive way, much more subtly than at present. Worth a read. He says Steve Gillmor is trying to write an algorithm.

The Lost Remote TV Blog reports on CNN’s decision to open up to user-generated content.

Called CNN Exchange and powered in part by Blip.tv, the section combines CNN.com’s blogs and message boards with user-submitted video, photos and comments, or I-Reports. “User-generated content has the potential to play a pivotal role in journalism whether it’s online or offline,” said Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer for CNN.com.

Note: Blip.tv is one of the video sites that was recommended at the BlogHer conference as an alternative to YouTube , according to Robert Scoble, following the recent fuss about its new Ts & Cs (giving YouTube rights over everything you post)

Jeff Jarvis lists some of the ways of competing with google including the view that specialised search has real potential.

Digg has launched some visualisation tools on digg labs – a site dedicated to building tools on top of the very popular Digg recommendation site.

John Batelle discusses selection criteria for getting a site listed on Google News and concludes that there are opaque editorial processes going on which Google is doing little to shine a light on.

Where does all the Google traffic go? Bill Tancer’s Hitwise blog provided the answer – a breakdown of all the US Google traffic by Google site. The main Google site still attracts 80% of the traffic, and images comes in at #2 with 8.6%.

Matt Cutts, the Googler who blogs mainly about SEO, has posted some simple guides to SEO onto Google Video. As he says, the quality is not polished as they were shot at home using amateur equipment and uploaded without editing. Worth a look.

John Battelle reports on more online sleuthing which has unearthed experimental services from Google.

In the experimental bin sandbox.google.com, added 14 services to his “sandbox” account. Some of these are already disclosed, so only the surprises are listed here: Google Events, Google Guess, Google Online Assessment, Google Real Estate Search, Mobile Marketplace, New Service (AKA Workplace), and New Services.

Onstartups, a blog for entrepreneurs has 17 Pithy Insights For Startup Founders. I particularly like number 13 – “The problem you solve should be ugly. The solution you build should be beautiful.” Can’t say this description springs to mind all that often, though.