CONFONZ — The lovely thing about having a relatively well read gossip blog is that people bring the gossip to you. Case in point: the AOL Beta that resembles Yahoo's page. Someone inside AOL, or at least, inside AOL's heating ducts, brings us this report on the words of Ron Grant at yesterday's AOL management summit.

You probably can't use this since I can't supply you with the video feed, but yesterday in AOL's Management Summit, while defending his choice of copying Yahoo's portal, Grant suggested that we "invented the left nav" and many other web standards, so that, in essence, we aren't copying, since we innovated these things in it the first place.

More after the jump.

Furthermore, he insisted that there are "standards" that everyone uses that are best for the consumers, but overall dodged the question with execuspeak, never taking true accountability and owning up to it. He did also mention that the Beta site is in an evolutionary stage and that it will evolve as new features are added. Sounds to me like changes will be made to the design to cover it up.

Of course, our previous coverage contains a nice easy to understand screenshot.

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