Tina Brown — who once edited Tatler, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker and Talk — has reinvented herself by editing a website that mixes high and low culture. Where have we heard that before?

IAC boss Barry Diller could not give a fluff about this "recession" you speak of! While pessimists like our own boss here are laying people off in anticipation of economic doom for media companies in the coming year, Diller is prescribing just the opposite strategy. Yesterday he slammed profitable companies for making layoffs and throwing workers out into an unforgiving environment, and said now is a great time to buy companies. He also railed against "indiscriminate spending." So does Diller measure up to his own expectations? Ehhh...

Changes are afoot at IAC, the media giant operated by Barry Diller. AdAge reports that Diller plans to scale back the company's collection of online content properties and possibly sell off or shut down underperforming sites like 236.com. The man Diller tapped to head up online programming, Michael Jackson, is expected to stay at IAC. And the changes, you'll be happy to hear, should have no impact on Tina Brown's extravagant new site, The Daily Beast. [AdAge]

It sounds like a fun night for Barry Diller: Closeted magazine Details put on a party for Milk, a movie about the first openly gay man elected to office in California, and the InterActive Corp. chairman was in attendance. Designer Marc Jacobs was there with his boyfriend, as was Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford, chatting, for some reason with Taylor Momsen. Topping off the evening quite nicely, fashion executive Diane von Fursternberg "invited Diller... back to her place," according to Page Six, along with designer Valentino Garavani and actress Marisa Berenson. For dinner, of course. Which was awfully generous, considering that von Furstenberg is Diller's wife. Officially, at least. As Diller knows well, mergers take quite some time to integrate, and some components just never mesh at all.

♦ ABC appears to generated the highest ratings as the election results rolled in last night. NBC came in second and CNN ranked third. [TV Decoder]
♦ Time is rushing to produce a commemorative issue of the mag by the end of the week. [HuffPo]
♦ Both People and Us Weekly will feature Obama on the covers of the next issue. [NYP]
♦ Can The Daily Show survive an Obama presidency? and how will other media outlets deal with the post-election dropoff? [Politico, AdAge]
♦ An explanation of that holography thingie on CNN last night. [YouTube]

The layoffs are moving up the food chain, from the startups to the larger tech beasts. FuckedStartups writes that Ticketmaster is laying off 35 percent of its 3,000-plus staff, which squares with other reports I've heard. Ticketmaster is besieged with competition from concert promoter LiveNation, and was recently spun off by IAC. If I had to bet, I'd say these cuts have as much to do with removing the layers of cruft which accumulated under years of flitty mismanagement by IAC CEO Barry Diller as they do with the economy.

Though she's a newcomer to the internet, Tina Brown has spent a lifetime honing her ability to self-promote. Which is how the former Vanity Fair editor seemed to have instinctively grasped what was expected of her last night on the Colbert Report: sell the sizzle, not the steak when it comes to her new internet venture, the Daily Beast — and remember that no points are deducted for going a bit over the top, per the self-parodying bloviations of host Stephen Colbert. When it came time to discuss the Beast's central role in getting Christopher Buckley fired from National Review, Brown couldn't just say the incident was exciting — no, she had to claim it turned the whole office into a party! Lest anyone think she was joking, Brown again mentioned how much the firing thrilled her a few breaths later. Brown, who has herself done away with plenty of magazine writers, may be learning the nuts and bolts of the Web on the job, but her gleeful, shameless bloodlust may yet reveal her as a natural for the medium. For proof, click the video icon to watch the attached clip.

Strip away the disclaimers, the Manhattan-media insideriness, the me-me-me from Simon Dumenco's report in AdAge on the Daily Beast, the Tina Brown-led news-aggregation website backed by Barry Diller's IAC Internet conglomerate, and you get these staggering figures:

Buried in a Wall Street Journal interview with Barry Diller, CEO of the ever-shifting Internet conglomerate IAC, which owns Ask.com and some other websites, was a nugget of insight revealing what Diller thinks of the people who invest in his company. Asked about IAC's stock performance, he replied:The truth is the market made judgments, and the recent judgments have been poor. There were legitimate reasons for that. Now, there are operating facts about this company that are irrefutable: It has revenue, it has earnings, it has a lot of cash and no debt.

Ask.com's latest revamp, unveiled by CEO Jim Safka to the New York Times, attempts to dive deeper into the Web, pulling "structured data," a fashionable buzzword, from sources like TV listings and health databases. Give Barry Diller's scrappy search engine, owned by his IAC conglomerate, this much: When at first it doesn't succeed, it tries, tries, tries again. But you can't blame the market, or users, for finding all this trying, well, trying.Safka's example — a search for the popular tween star Miley Cyrus which yields TV listings for her Hannah Montana show — looks convincing, at first glance. Neither Yahoo nor Google show TV listings in the first page of search results. But Googling "Miley Cyrus TV listings" readily pulls up a page on TVGuide.com. Ask.com's strategy relies on the notion that a small team of engineers and product managers can guess what users want, find the right databases to pull the information from, and assemble it more effectively than the dominant search engine's algorithms. It's a romantic notion of man vs. machine. But I seem to recall John Henry died at the end.

Tina Brown unveiled this morning her new internet venture, the Daily Beast. The Post's Keith Kelly said the website, a revival of the fictional paper in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, is in the "soft launch phase," meaning apparently that it's devoid of advertisers, and that it "sees itself as a must-read for hipsters in news, politics and pop culture." Ahem. From our quick look — it temporarily went password protected as we were reading — the site seemed more noteworthy for its slavish devotion to internet publishing memes than for any particular innovation. Some traffic-baiting Apple coverage? Yes, there's a column by former Think Secret publisher Nicholas Ciarelli. Celebrity contributors? Sure, if you count the likes of Bill Clinton, who mails in book recommendations, and Project Runway alumna Laura Bennett, who posted a column. There's counterintuitive, Slate-like material such as "Why I Call My Wall Street Patients Pussies," by an ostensibly caring psychiatrist. And, as if to prove she is now truly blogger, Brown concludes her debut column with the one-word sentence, "Heh." Soon she'll emailing Digg requests to her old publishing friends and trying to get to 10,000 friends on Facebook, and we'll all find it hard to imagine she ever edited the New Yorker.

The Daily Beast, the website overseen by Tina Brown and backed by Barry Diller, has launched. [The Daily Beast]

FiLife, a personal-finance site backed by IAC and the Wall Street Journal, is struggling, according to one ex-employee we eavesdropped on at the City Bakery, a coffeehouse in Manhattan's Flatiron neighborhood, as she interviewed for a new job. "The business model completely changed," she said. "It used to be personal finance for people in their 20s and 30s. Now it's just completely pointless." An embittered writer? Perhaps. FiLife hired a batch of journalists, only to switch gears shortly before launch and realize that the Web didn't need another content site. But their replacement — a set of automated tools to evaluate one's place in the financial pecking order — do seem pointless. The site only attracts 31,500 users a month. In this regard, FiLife is utterly typical — of both its backer and its genre.IAC CEO Barry Diller has a ghastly track record of launching projects in-house; almost every vaguely promising Internet property he owns, he bought from someone else: Ask.com, Match.com, CitySearch, and so on. And personal finance sites are deadly. In trying to break the mold, FiLife managed to be even more condescending than most. Its introduction:

At an oh-so-pink party in Times Square yesterday — one stuffed with enough cupcakes to Google's Marissa Mayer proud — IAC launched a virtual world for girls aged 6 to 12, calling it Zwinky Cuties. Barry Diller presided and I captured the bizarre affair in video.Zwinky Cuties is free to enter, but little girls who want to dress their avatars in the latest fashions will need to pony up $5.99 a month. Worry about turning our children into consumer drones, but don't worry about the pedos, says IAC exec John Park. Zwinky Cuties is "entirely safe and really designed for young girls," he says. Does Mr. Park have a Zwinky? "I do. He looks twenty years younger." Park would not show his Zwinky to us. IAC CEO Barry Diller, who showed up to the event and made a speech to press and a crowd of bored IAC spawn, said: "I guess it would be clear that I do not qualify to join Zwinky Cuties or if I did I would probably be arrested." Then Disney's latest 20-something pop star took the stage, said she was proud to be a role model, and began to sing a song to the children about a cute, but shy boy who hangs out by his locker. Men in sports jerseys stopped and stared in through the studio's windows. They waved and took pictures with their cell phones.

Tina Brown's image as a media power player remains anchored in the 1980s and the 1990s, when she edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She's attempting to change that with an internet venture, the Daily Beast, funded by InterActive Corp. chairman Barry Diller. But an early blunder getting Beast off the ground has left Brown red-faced and more shackled to her past than ever. It seems Brown's big idea for launching her website was — stop us if you've heard this one before — to publish a big list of the most powerful people in Hollywood. "The idea is so 1980s," one source told Nikki Finke. Apparently no one is even bothering to call Brown's staff back as they attempt to report the feature:

At the Diane von Fürstenberg show at New York's Fashion Week, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his 23andMe cofounder wife Anne Wojcicki were spotted front and center. Which is hilarious, since Brin is rarely seen in anything but a t-shirt and jeans — hopefully he wore more stylish footwear than Crocs. Here he's spotted in the usual ensemble with Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, who had the sense to wear actual fashion. Friday's winner was hmann with "No, it's $40 for one song. You have to buy your own drinks, and there's no touching." (Photo by Getty/Michael Tran)

Following the shutdown of Muxtape, a site for posting online mixtapes, in a dispute with the music industry, someone has launched Opentape.fm, where you can download code to easily create your own Muxtape-like online mixtapes of MP3 files. And if the creators of Muxtape aren't directly responsible, they probably fed Opentape's developers everything they would need. The first clue is that the site is powered by the favored online publishing platform of millennial hipsters, Tumblr. Another clue is that the domain registration information points to 152 W. 57th Street in Manhattan, which just happens to be IAC CEO Barry Diller's address (Justin Ouellette, Muxtape's founder, worked at IAC site Vimeo). Then there are two small hints in the code:The site uses a package of Javascript, Mootools, which was also used by Muxtape. And in the source code, an HTML comment reading "Liberating taste" appears where an ASCII graphic appears in the Muxtape source code. The launch of Opentape is likely a tactic in Muxtape's fight against the RIAA. It puts the record industry trade organization in the position of having to play whack-a-mole as mixes pop up on numerous clone sites using the open-source software. It also means that Muxtape's backers no longer have to shoulder the site's soaring bandwidth costs.

• Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is expanding the probe into auction-rate financing. [Reuters]

Ooh, symbolic. The New York Times website has been down for several minutes. And tonight's New York technology meetup has been cancelled because of power problems at the Gehry-designed headquarters of troubled internet conglomerate IAC.

New York wantrepreneurs preparing for a night of rejection and glazed looks can relax — tonight's New York Tech Meetup is canceled due to a power outage at IAC. "We tried to find a replacement venue for tonight, but couldn't find anything for all 400 of us at this late notice," reads a memo sent to all invitees. The group won't meet again until September 2. Trust us: You'll survive four weeks without learning about the next great Muxtape killer. (Photo by waywuwei)