You know all that great proprietary content that AOL representatives used to brag about? The stuff they'd spend half an hour droning on about over the phone when all you wanted to do was cancel that free AOL trial you used just long enough to sign up for Earthlink or NetZero (or better yet, broadband service)? The "hidden" resources they kept bringing up every time they called to beg you to rejoin AOL? Well, it's all available for free now:

The walls guarding America Online's proprietary content quietly started to crumble this week as the company placed most of its news, sports, chats and other features on the open Internet. That's the culmination of AOL's 18-month-old plan to vie head-on with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft as an advertising-driven Web portal. The new strategy is a bid to offset the loss of millions of subscribers. As part of a test, online users now can access a Web version of AOL's trademark welcome screen and menu of content channels by going to AOL.com and clicking on a link called "AOL.com Beta Test." Over the summer, AOL plans to move the programming directly to AOL.com. "Very quietly, the walled-garden era has ended," AOL Chief Jonathan Miller said after meeting with USA TODAY's editorial board.

Now that it's free, I still don't want it. [USA Today] AOL takes bold step: Content's now free