While I was watching the Super Bowl (hooray non-Steelers!) and watching Glee for the very first time (it’s like the Disney Channel’s High School Musical movies, only with less sincerity or realism), big news came down in the online realm.

Arianna Huffington and her investors announced they’re selling HuffingtonPost.com to AOL.

Ms. Huffington herself will stay on board, running both HuffPost and AOL’s existing content sites. These include Engadget, TechCrunch, Politics Daily, PopEater, Moviefone, MapQuest, Autoblog, FanHouse, StyleList, and Black Voices. (Taken as a whole, AOL’s current sites already employ more journalists and editors than any other online-only media concern.)

Since many tech-biz observers seem to believe that everything AOL touches turns to dross, there are worthy worries about the fate of everybody’s favorite liberal punditry and “celebrity skin” aggregation site.

Will AOL do for HuffPo what it did for (or rather, to) Time Warner?

Will HuffPo’s daring advocacy and insatiable curiosity for new trends become subsumed under AOL’s management driven policy (known within the company as “the AOL Way”), which determines what gets written about on its sites on a complex formula designed to drive productivity and search engine hits?

One thing’s for sure—the deal’s official price tag. It’s $315 million.

How much was Newsweek sold for? Apparently not a whole helluva lot.

How much was BusinessWeek sold for? Not a whole helluva lot more.

UPDATE: Here’s one of those tech-biz observers who thinks it’s a potentially lousy deal, but one both sides needed to make.