Rumor has is that AOL is in talks to acquire local news aggregation company Outside.in. The talks may fall apart since it is in early stages according to BusinessInsider. Steven Johnson founded Outside.in in 2006. Investors in Outside.in include Union Square Ventures, Marc Andreessen, John Borthwick, Esther Dyson, and CNN. If AOL does end up acquiring Outside.in, it is likely that they will roll the technology into Patch.com.

URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]