Word now comes that Liberty, former cable baron John Malone's company, has opportunistically paid $340 million for 14 million shares in Barry Diller's IAC, raising its stake to 30 percent. IAC, too, repurchased 6 million shares at the same time. That means that Diller must have begrudgingly consented to the sale; at the same time, he reached an agreement that prevented Malone from taking a bigger stake in the online conglomerate. But who was the seller?

What's the meaning of the terse statement that billionaire John Malone has increased his stake in IAC to 30%? IAC's Barry Diller is pretty menacing, in a killer queen fashion. But Malone is the one tycoon that all the others, including Diller and even Rupert Murdoch, are scared by. His dealmaking ruthlessness is such that the Liberty Media boss was nicknamed 'Darth Vader' by his peers in the cable industry, in which he made his first fortune. In October, Malone bluntly told the Wall Street Journal he thought Barry Diller was no longer bringing value to Ticketmaster, Ask.com, College Humor and the other sites IAC owns. "The hook is set. It is our company," he said of IAC. "Barry ain't going to be able to spit the hook." By dropping the news on a Friday evening, Barry Diller may minimize his public humiliation. But that doesn't alter the reality: he's bent to Darth Vader's will.

The demise of Conde Nast's scrapbook site for teenaged girls, Flip.com, was a reminder. How is that other big website launch of 2007 going? 23/6, a joint venture between Barry Diller's IAC and Kenny Lerer's Huffington Post, was two years in the making. The political humor launched in November to lackluster reviews; but maybe it's caught fire since, what with the elections and all. Who are we kidding? A quick search on Compete.com shows 23/6 is as stillborn as Time Inc's Office Pirates, Viacom's Virtual Lower East Side — and every other site that springs from the loins of New York's media titans. They really should have read The Innovator's Dilemma, that standard reference book for young-at-heart moguls, more carefully.

Working for Barry Diller is a harrowing experience. Just take a look at Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com, before he joined IAC, and after. Even so, we're reconsidering our sympathetic view of Lanzone. We hear that one big reason he was fired was the slipping schedule on an Ask.com news site. Despite putting 20 people nearly full-time on the project, and getting help from Digg, Lanzone missed a December deadline for the site, now slated for a February launch.

Are New York's established media companies entirely incapable of developing web properties? Barry Diller's IAC just fired the head of Ask.com after the search engine's obscure "algorithm" campaign failed to eat into Google's lead among web users. Now, word that Conde Nast is laying off staff on Flip.com, a social network for teen girls which was the magazine group's biggest greenfield web initiative. Flip.com attracts less than 20% of the audience it had last April. The new plan, we hear: let Flip scrapbooks be embedded in other more successful West Coast social networks such as Facebook and Myspace. This is what New York media is reduced to: a widget. (Anyone have the Flip.com layoff email? Forward it me!)

Bloody Diller. IAC's Ask.com has a new CEO, Jim Safka, who was swiftly installed in the place of Jim Lanzone. Lanzone was fired by Barry Diller, according to sources. And so yet another talented entrepreneurial type makes way for a Diller yes-man. The cover story is that Lanzone left to accept a position as entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures — a cozy, face-saving sort of holding tank for CEOs in between jobs.

Primal Ventures, IAC's corporate venture arm, is "gearing up to launch a new child-oriented portal and interactive entertainment company," according to a job listing on DevBistro. Sounds like Barry Diller & Co. are developing a virtual world targeted to children, joining Viacom, Disney, Warner Bros., and just about every other media company on the planet in following the trend started by Webkinz and Club Penguin. Imagine that: An unoriginal, me-too Internet project, coming late to the party, from Barry Diller. (Photo by Getty Images)

Not only has Barry Diller exiled his former IAC No. 2, Doug Lebda, to LendingTree; he's officially washing his hands of Lebda's company. After he finishes splitting IAC into five parts, Diller plans to stay involved only with the new IAC and Ticketmaster, as well as Expedia, the online travel agent he spun off in 2005. A source close to Lebda believes he's just as glad to be through with Diller.

Left in the wake of Barry Diller's acquisitive empire: a flotsam of discarded executives. Doug Lebda, IAC's president and COO since 2003, now joins them. According to an internal memo obtained by Valleywag, Lebda has been appointed CEO of IAC's mortgage and finance businesses, which are soon to be spun off. This can hardly be welcome news to Lebda, who's essentially returning to LendingTree, a business he founded in 1996 and sold to Diller in 2003. Here's the memo.

The herd of day traders is debating whether to buy Apple before Steve Jobs's keynote at Macworld Expo. But following the herd is a strategy that generally leads to getting trampled. Eric Savitz of Barron's spots a smarter strategy: Buy Amazon.com, and sell — or at least avoid — Barry Diller's IAC. Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney says IAC has "few countercyclical hedges to protect against a potentially material economic slowdown in the U.S." What does that mean?

Connected Ventures cofounder Zach Klein did fly out to California to interview for a gig at MySpace, but it wasn't the right fit for him. Or he wasn't the right fit for MySpace. Hard to tell which. So what's the designer behind BustedTees and Vimeo up to next? Think geckos and real estate.

Barry Diller likes to talk up how New Yorky his Manhattan-headquartered IAC is, but in fact, his most important online businesses are based in California, like Ask.com. San Francisco-area IAC workers are having their holiday party tonight at the Independent, 628 Divisadero St. "Bonus points to anyone who videos themselves gaining entry as Vimeo staff wearing their best American Apparel hoodie and art-skool glasses," says a Grinch of a tipster.

IAC, after it spins off all its boring businesses like HSN and LendingTree, will be left with a motley collection of questionably successful startups with so-cute-you-could-pinch-them names like Vimeo and Zwinky. In an interview with the New York Observer, Diller saves special favor for Very Short List, a daily email newsletter which sells one thing a day, with just two employees. Think of it as a Woot.com, but for aging billionaires. He claims to have bought 30 items off the list. "Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished," Diller tells the Observer. But as the newspaper points out, IAC's market cap has shrunk from $22 billion in 2003, before it spun off Expedia, to $8 billion today. A bit too late for an email to stop his diminution, I think.

IAC-owner and New Media Mogul Barry Diller went from the man who created the Fox network and greenlighted The Simpsons to the dude who owns Zwinky.com. He's still filthy rich and owns the biggest yacht ever and never needs to leave his gigantic office atop his Frank Gehry castle, but his former boss and current sorta-rival Rupert Murdoch just continues amassing power and influence and Presidents while Diller is creating and buying little funny (but sometimes hugely profitable!) websites. Does that bug him? According to a profile by the Observer's Doree Shafrir... maybe?

Silicon Alley Insider decided to revive one of Jason Calacanis's oldest traditions and produce a Silicon Alley 100. In doing so, the blog run by disgraced tech stock analyst Henry Blodget just proves the thoroughgoing irrelevance of the exercise. The editors' No. 1 man in New York? Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Some other highlights among the old, the rich and the boring? AOL topper Randy Falco, IAC's Barry Diller and Jupitermedia's Alan Meckler. The closest SAI comes to someone we care about is VC blogger Fred Wilson — a moneyman, not an entrepreneur. As in Calacanis's time, New York is where ideas come to be financed, repackaged, and marketed — not invented.

IAC's Ticketmaster division is trying to close a multiyear deal to be the official ticket scalper of the National Football League. TicketMaster competitor and eBay subsidiary StubHub is the other potential bidder for resale rights. Earlier this year, Stubhub made a deal to resell Major League Baseball tickets, a significant blow to Ticketmaster. Unfortunately for Ticketmaster, while the MLB deal gave StubHub resale rights for all 30 teams at once, because of the way the NFL is structured, the league has negotiating rights for only about half the league.

While Facebook goes around denying rumors about deals in China, IAC chairman Barry Diller is telling anybody who will listen about his plans for Asian expansion. Diller told reporters this morning that IAC will spend $100 million in China, and bring over its Ask.com search engine, too. This will raise IAC's Chinese investments to $300 million. (Photo by AP/Elaine Thompson)

Yesterday, we floated a rumor that IAC was thinking about buying social network MyYearbook. Not the case, says Caroline McCarthy of News.com. Her sources hypothesize that MyYearbook's participation in a "mock pitch" session with IAC's Barry Diller at this week's Quadrangle conference was mistaken for something more than it was, a sort of moot court for entrepreneurs. We're not so sure. Our source told us that MyYearbook was "the winner" — and not just of that presentation. The site caught Diller's attention, possibly enough to set talks in motion. Were any potential talks nixed after word leaked to Valleywag? Quite possible. Diller likes to buy cheap, and rumors have been known to spark bidding wars. (Photo by saveena)

MerchantCircle has secured an additional $10 million in series B funding from past investors Rustic Canyon Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Steamboat Ventures (Disney's VC arm), as well as new investors including Barry Diller's IAC and Square 1 Bank. The press release claims, "the investment validates the company's 'merchant-first' business model." I'd say, rather, it confirms that investors who should know better will sink cash into a disreputable business.