Aol will be spun off from Time Warner on December 9. Yesterday they unveiled a new logo or, rather, they previewed set of logos. While the “Aol Dot.” will remain constant, the backgrounds will change continuously to suggest the breadth of the company’s content:

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.

Aol. Those three letters remind many of us of a past paradigm for days gone by. SearchEngineLand:

A decade ago it was the dominant internet “portal” and destination of the day. But over time and through some neglect the brand became stale and associated with unsophisticated users: “training wheels for the internet.” The company later developed an ambivalent attitude toward “AOL,” pushing independent brands such as Platform A, Moviefone, PopEater, Engadget, MapQuest, GameDaily, TMZ, Truveo, MediaGlow (among others) to minimize or avoid the “newbie” stigma.

Is Aol like Proctor & Gamble or a magazine publisher, which has a portfolio of consumer brands or is it more like Apple, which has a single brand identity with a number of products in the market? Some version of this question must be answered.

Aol has decided the company is going to emphasize “content.” That necessarily involves a balance between cultivating individual brands as destinations online and, if the Aol brand isn’t going to be totally subordinated, some positioning of the parent brand in relation to those content brands.

AOL still generates the “vast majority” of its profits from its subscription business. Its media business currently loses about $600 million a year. Recently the company has been shedding assets and just last week said it will cut one-third of its staff.