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.

Barry Diller's IAC began talks to acquire Flixster, but then dropped the idea as soon as the two-year-old, 17-employee company priced itself at $150 million, according to Boom Town. And it seems IAC isn't the only one saying no. Execs from Viacom's MTV Networks gave Flixster a look, but also decided the price was too high. Flixster's Facebook application, Movies, claims 804,748 daily active users, a milestone achieved with just $2 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. So what's keeping buyers so shy, besides the lofty price?

Jakob Lodwick, no longer Barry Diller's secret weapon, is out at Vimeo, the IAC-controlled online-video site he founded. So what's next for the notorious fame-seeker?

Jakob Lodwick, the Vimeo founder allegedly fired today from the IAC-controlled online-video site loves to post racy photos of himself and his love, notorious New York nobody and Star editor-at-large Julia Allison. That fact can't have been lost on his corporate overseers, which makes commenter brigamortis's theory — that he'd been fired for posting a mildly salacious photo of Allison to his personal blog — seem ridiculous on its face. Still, Lodwick took the photo in question off his blog, a move which raises suspicions. We obtained the photo, above. Could Allison's knockers really have gotten Lodwick canned?

We now hear that Jakob Lodwick, the fame-seeking oddball who started Vimeo, didn't quit the IAC-controlled video site — he was fired. And probably not for his views on Web development, either. Anyone know more?

"As of an hour ago, I am no longer affiliated with IAC/InterActiveCorp/Connected Ventures/Vimeo. No hard feelings!" writes Jakob Lodwick on his blog. A shame. Lodwick's work at the Barry Diller-controlled online-video venture was our only excuse for paying attention to him and his can't-stop-watching trainwreck of a relationship with notorious nobody Julia Allison. Aside from your work at Diller's answer to YouTube, what will take the guilty out of our pleasure now, Jakob? Update: Back to guilty-pleasure status with Lodwick. The latest rumor is that he was fired.

Jakob Lodwick took a moment away from running the video site he founded, Vimeo, to blog some of the advice he'd been giving a "younger person named Chris about web development." Younger? This from a guy Wallstrip's Lindsay Campbell described as "just a normal, twentysomething boy millionaire." Share with us, oh wise and aged one, your precious pearls. No, not those. Eww. Save those for Julia Allison. Your pearls of wisdom, Jakob.

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)

Former AOL CTO John McKinley has joined with IAC alumnus Sean Green to create LaunchBox Digital. It's an investment fund for digital media, with incubator services and oh-so-helpful advice, according to reports. To his credit, McKinley oversaw the success of TMZ.com, but seriously, if you've got an idea with legs, why take it to the guy who couldn't figure out how to turn millions of instant-messaging users into a social network?

IAC and the Huffington Post brought fake news site 23/6 out of beta today. It only took them two years to come up with this? The site features political satire and targets people in the news with articles, videos and photos. If this sounds familiar, it's possibly because HBO and AOL already tried the same concept out with This Just In, to which the Wall Street Journal compares 23/6. The Journal does not note that This Just In shuttered in September. Another reason for pessimism? The site hasn't sold out its inventory for launch. It's currently running ads for BustedTees, another IAC company. Seriously, what kind of crappy blog displays ads from its parent company's network?

Guess what's live today? 23/6, the IAC-Huffpo comedy site that is pretty much two years in the making! Back in August, we pretty thoroughly trashed the beta. And now... here we are. (Launching a website on a Friday!?!? Do not ever do this, by the way.) So, really, what's to say? Well: Is there anything less funny than comedy? And: It's like Newser, but with irony! But we hope it's a huge success. We wouldn't want Barry Diller and HuffPo's Ken Lerer to lose any of their magical internet credibility. Also we hope the 23/6 kids don't hate working for 23/6 as much as we hear pretty much everyone currently can't stand working at HuffPo.

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.

Why, asks CNBC, did Barry Diller split up his mega-internets corporation into five different ones? The answer: Apparently Frank Gehry's IAC headquarters can't support all that weight or something? Spin, Barry, spin! Actually it's kind of awesome that he doesn't feel the need to bother with talking points. THAT is what being rich is all about.

IAC chairman Barry Diller, a.k.a. Mr. Diane von Furstenberg, was on CNBC's Power Lunch show today, talking about his decision to break up the company into itty bitty pieces. Asked why, after years of talking up the benefits of keeping disparate Internet properties together, Diller changed direction, the media mogul dodged several times before stammering his way to an answer. "Well, as I said, having everything under one roof is good until the roof may collapse because of the, so to speak, weight growing up underneath." Come again? Diller's media training kicks in at this point, as he realizes his error. "How's that for an awkward thing?"

Gizmodo editor Brian Lam and I had the following conversation on AIM this morning:

By our count, Ticketmaster's upcoming spinoff from IAC will be the seventh time Barry Diller has bought or sold a piece of the online-ticketing agency, starting from the first stake he acquired in it a decade ago. After the jump, a chronology of Diller's Ticketmaster deals.

In the midst of a call laying out IAC's plans to break up into five separate companies, CEO Barry Diller announced that he'd struck a five-year deal with Google to carry its search ads on Ask.com, an arrangement he says will be worth $3.5 billion. As we'd reported, Diller had little choice but to go with Google, since its competition likely couldn't afford to offer equally lucrative terms.