Telecom mogul John Malone has been putting the squeeze on his old buddy Barry Diller, who runs IAC. So what does Diller do? Break his search and e-commerce conglomerate into five parts. Diller's sticking with the new IAC, which will mostly consist of the Ask.com search engine — oh, and Jakob Lodwick, too. HSN, Ticketmaster, LendingTree, and Interval International are getting spun off. We just want to know who's getting stuck with the bill for IAC's new headquarters in Chelsea.

Last week we wondered how IAC honcho Barry Diller was going to fix his troubles with John Malone, his #1 shareholder. The answer appears to be: Splitting IAC into five separate publicly-traded companies? Really? The majority (from College Humor to Ask.com to Match.com) remain with IAC proper; retail divisions like HSN.com go off together, as do Ticketmaster and Lending Tree. Amusingly, we hear that IAC staff haven't actually gotten official word of this yet—they all found out from their news alerts on the company. Update: Ooh, we hear the staff are going into a 10 a.m. meeting to find out all about this! Update update: Now we hear the staff meeting was postponed or something—and Barry will hold a live press conference at 11 a.m. on the roof of the IAC headquarters! (How dramatic!) Update update update: Now we hear the press conference is a no-go! Ha! But the conference call will go on as planned.

We can't really parse much of this Wall Street Journal story on the complicated tangle of investments between IAC honcho Barry Diller and John Malone, Barry's #1 stakeholder. (For instance: Who wanted it written? And why?) But! We did learn that apparently Barry Diller motors around Manhattan on a lil' scooter? That is really odd, and we had no idea. Also Barry should sue over their hideous illustration. [WSJ]

They said Barry Diller was out of his mind! And yet, according to this in-house promotional video that we've obtained, his company, IAC, has a giant Frank Gehry-designed headquarters full of young people working their internet brands like Match.com, Ask.com. It's a young company! Everyone there is in the loop! It's happening! They are an endlessly multi-product company! He has a smaller but smarter army! Also we love the part about 1:30 from the end when the guy doing payroll starts screaming at the College Humor staff too. But don't get too comfortable, staffers: "This company will change on a dime and will be able to change its strategy" at the drop of a hat, says some executive guy. Yes, that's when they take you and your once-hot young brand out back and grind you into meat.

More and more artists are striking innovative deals to sell their music — and leaving the traditional record industry contract behind. The Wall Street Journal reports that once Madonna's contract with Warner Music is up, she will link up with concert-promoter Live Nation. While not as revolutionary as Radiohead's pay-what-you-want plan, or Prince's free-music-with-newspaper deal, Live Nation is a concert production company, not a record label. Madonna's deal will bring album production and distribution, concerts, merchandise and publicity under one company.

With time running out on an advertising deal with Google, Barry Diller's Ask.com is facing bigger issues than the company's painfully unmemorable advertising. The IAC-owned search engine is dependent on Google-brokered text ads for a large portion of its revenues — but Google, which now sells ads on MySpace, among others, is not nearly as dependent on Ask.com. Fortunately for Diller, Microsoft and Yahoo are stupidly eager to prove themselves in the search-advertising market. If Google does end its ad deal with Ask.com, both companies would be happy to sign on Ask as a partner. One small problem: Neither Yahoo nor Microsoft make as much money per search as Google, which means that they have less money to split with Ask, even if they give it a more generous share. And a deal with either one would still leave Ask dependent on a rival search engine. Save for building its own advertising system, at considerable expense, Ask has no easy way out of the Google deal.

Barry Diller's IAC/InterActive Corp. launched a revamped iWon.com portal. The search engine, acquired along with Ask.com, has always drawn visitors by offering prizes. But it now promises more prizes, a social network and a more explicit link to IAC's Ask.com search engine. I, for one, am excited to have the opportunity to never visit the new site as much as I did the old one. [TechCrunch]

Barry Diller is easily bored. First, he was entranced by the promise of e-commerce, assembling an empire that includes such diverse offerings as Evite, the Home Shopping Network, and Ticketmaster. Then he turned his attention to search and snapped up Ask.com. With such a motley portfolio, why not add a jack-of-all-trades videogame company to your portfolio? Diller, the CEO of holding company IAC/InterActiveCorp, is focusing his energies on the videogame sector now. By acquiring a majority stake in GarageGames, which does everything from development tools and game creation to indie game publishing, Diller hopes to complement the yet-to-be launched InstantAction.com. But as usual, Diller's strategic vision isn't matched by his grasp of the technical details.

Those stunned by notorious East Coast nobody Julia Allison's infamous arrival on the Silicon Valley scene might be surprised to learn that she actually has a job. Apparently she writes columns for Time Out New York. About her sex life. And here's a shocker: Allison claims nerds make the best lovers. I know the identity of the geek who gave Allison what she writes is "the best sex I've ever had." But instead of just telling you, I'm going to let you guess, in the comments, who it is. Two hints: It's certainly not high-and-dry TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington. And it's not, despite appearances, Jakob Lodwick, founder of IAC-controlled video site Vimeo. Unless his efforts over the weekend were particularly heroic. So who is the geek stud Allison had in mind? Leave your tawdry rumors in the comments. (Photo by Jakob Lodwick)

Why are green-eyeshades types calling AdBrite's customers and asking probing questions about the online-advertising network? The company founded by Philip Kaplan of FuckedCompany fame — pictured here with some friends — might be giving accountants an eyeful for a host of reasons. Let's rule out an IPO: The Sequoia Capital-backed startup, with a rumored $40 million in gross revenues, is still too small to go public. That leaves an acquisition as the most likely scenario. Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have all bought ad marketplaces recently. But for Barry Diller's IAC, which also owns second-tier search engine Ask.com, AdBrite would be a modest purchase. One other possibility: AdBrite could be making a buy of its own to get more heft. Anyone heard more?

Is it true that Jakob Lodwick, the founder of IAC-controlled online-video site Vimeo, has gone on several dates with notorious nobody Julia Allison, the TV commentator and magazine columnist whose brief visit terrorized Silicon Valley and left desperately horny TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington so heartbroken he apparently threw himself into another woman's arms? Just think: Allison traveled thousands of miles to find a geek to love, and there were plenty of eligible nerd bachelors in New York all the while. From the shirtless photo he posted of himself, we can kind of see why Allison might go for him. Add to that IAC stock options and the ability to design a blog, and we'd say she's got herself quite a catch. Make a serious play for Jakob, Julia, before Barry Diller does. (Photo by Jakob Lodwick)

Now that News Corp. appears to have locked up Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, every journalist on the planet is volunteering to be an unpaid consultant to Rupert Murdoch. I'm sure he appreciates the free advice. The News Corp. CEO is so known for taking it, after all. First up, there's Kara Swisher's tabloid-headlined call for more "promiscuity," which I was about to get behind. Talk about a paper that needs sexing up! But then I discovered that the word, in Swisher's hands, has gone entirely limp. Her deflated meaning?

PaidContent runs a fake press release claiming that IAC, Barry Diller's publicly traded Web empire, was buying back shares. Um, no. [PaidContent.org]

It goes without saying that most online video is crap, and will continue to be so for quite awhile (perhaps forever). Undeterred, Barry Diller's Interactive Corp is steadily ramping up video on all its sites. The Wall Street Journal takes notice, particularly of College Humor's efforts, as those are furthest along. Still, it wouldn't be the WSJ without a tut-tut graf, which begins

LOCKHART STEELE — This here is the rooftop at the Hotel Gansevoort in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. In official photos like this, it looks sedate and dreamy. In real life, it looks something more like these photos—a sort of body-to-body insanity best avoided at all costs. (Noise from the roof is famous for haunting the neighbors, which won a prolonged battle to make the hotel install "silencers.")

• Supreme Court allows federal prosecutors to look at Judy Miller's phone records. Why do we even bother with a First Amendment? [NYT]
  

Pictured is Jakob Lodwick, of College Humor, lurking in the future new office of his InterActiveCorp overlord Barry Diller. Still undecided: where the obsidian sacrificial altar should go. Really needs to be next to a load-bearing wall. On a more sunny though still mystical note, the New York Times peeks into the IAC crystal ball by way of a profile on Michael Jackson, Diller's point man on most things Webward. Nothing shocking, though it's almost comical to consider the vast intellectual resources bent toward the creation and curation of Very Short List — IAC's recently debuted once-daily email of recommended stuff. In addition to Jacskon and, one presumes, Diller, you also have pillar o' the community Kurt Andersen, plus design input (at least initially) Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman. We all need smarter people to tell us what to buy these days. Besides the new digs, what's next on the IAC conquest plan?

Whatever interactive media InterActiveCorp overlord Barry Diller enjoys, it's apparently got nothing to do with Craigslist, or Gawker. Seeking a new executive assistant for Diller, an IAC human resources staffer advertised for the job on tha C-list — totally within bounds, reportedly, for non-confidential positions. We ran the ad here, as we often do for job listings relating to those powerful enough to squash us like the bugs we are. But it turns out the first rule of Barry Diller Club is, you do not talk about Barry Diller Club. The apparent abject humiliation of having the assistant ad on Gawker generated a pulse of executive rage from Diller's office all the way down to the HR caves, where the unfortunate staffer was promptly canned. Just makes working closely with Diller as his assistant sound so much more appealing.