• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 17, 2008

What it actually is, Marty Moe said this morning at the OMMA Publishing conference in New York, is, “a multi vertical multi-network publishing company.” Huh? In plain English, AOL wants to have its cake and link to it too.

So the once seminal on-ramp to the information superhighway is now all about fragmentation, Moe, said, emphasizing, “More importantly than anything, we want to lean into the fragmentation of the Web.”

That will become more evident over the next six to 12 months, Moe revealed, as AOL begins rolling out features and applications would otherwise be “more difficult for us if we were in the portal position.” While he did not reveal what some of those things might be, there's a pretty good bet that they will involve less of a destination orientation and more of a distributed content model.

That said, AOL isn't completely scuttling the portal model, but is striving to figure out exactly how to leverage it.

“We have a portal,” he said. “We are a portal in many ways. We have a home page with millions of visitors every day.”