• Ask. Diller said he planned to spend $100m developing and promoting IAC's flagship search engine. After an impenetrable advertising campaign, touting Ask's New Jersey algorithm, what's the impact on the search engine's market share? Nothing measurable. The chief executive, a Diller favorite, is out.
• Vimeo. Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen's College Humor remains popular among college students and those whose humor remains frozen in sophomore year. But IAC's bigger interest was the online video site, a precursor to Youtube, which the College Humor techies set up in the spare time. Vimeo creator and Julia Allison cheater, Jakob Lodwick, was fired late last year. Vimeo's traffic is hardly measurable beside Youtube.
• VSL (a highbrow email newsletter of cultural recommendations dreamed up by Kurt Andersen and Diller's content guru, Michael Jackson) is close to Diller's heart. "Without Very Short List, I would be much diminished," said Diller. Unfortunately, the internet as a whole would not be. Last time I checked, the subscription list was only some 20,000 people. (I'm told the base has grown several hundred percent since then.) Culturally-literate email-reading billionaires are in short supply.
• 23/6, IAC's stab at political humor with the help of the Huffington Post, is stillborn. Michael Jackson's other joint venture, a business site done in collaboration with Dow Jones, may never even get off the ground. Says one insider: "It's obvious it won't work somewhat from the outside but the inside scoop is zero progression/movement. As Sanchez (IAC's foul-mouthed head of corporate communications) might have said, just a lot of wanking."
• Lending Tree will be spun off for less than half the price Diller paid for it. This is not the best moment in the cycle to sell a mortgage broker. And the mogul did himself no favors by alienating Rich Barton, an IAC board member, who left aggrieved after Diller spun out Expedia, his online travel agent. Barton founded a competitor, Zillow.

IAC holds some prospering and substantial businesses such as Ticketmaster, the online ticketing site, and Match, the online dating exchange. But even these have been forced uncomfortably to walk in lockstep with IAC's other businesses, even when the logic has been flimsy. The unvarnished truth is that Diller, who built up Fox into the fourth television network for Rupert Murdoch, has a dismal track record in running internet businesses. No amount of Diller's brutal charm can obscure that.

What the mogul does have is the contrarian courage of a great investor, and a mastery of the dark arts of corporate infighting. He acquired e-commerce assets during the downturn, when other investors had written off the internet as a blip. And he's playing hardball with as much skill and ruthlessness as his disgruntled shareholder, John 'Darth Vader' Malone.

That raises the question. Why does Diller, a 65-year-old who enjoys his yacht and parties he throws with his hostess, fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, even pretend to run these businesses? He should not be the plucky entrepreneur fighting off the evil corporate raider. Diller is on the wrong side of that eternal conflict. He has certain skills and the temperament, just none suited to a managerial role. The detached and machinating capitalist played in the current struggle by John Malone? That should be, in the next business life at least, Diller himself.

The College Humor boys, most of them from the Baltimore suburbs far from the edgy inner city of The Wire, were ever bourgeois. Their famous parties have always had more in common with a prom night than a bacchanal. And it's not as if Josh was ever a design rebel: the centerpiece of the last apartment was a cabinet full of crystal wineglasses, donated by the College Humor founder's mother.

News of College Humor fella Zach Klein's departure from the lucrative website he co-founded got us to thinking: Who are these twenty-five-year-old millionaires, anyway? I mean, sure, we all read the New Yorker article two years ago, but the boys must be slightly different after a couple years of living in New York. Like: they probably watch Sex and the City way less! And maybe they've slept with some famous ("famous") people.

Ricky Van Veen: The Funny One

Notable quotable: "It's hard being taken seriously when you are our age. But, here, people can walk in and say, Obviously, these guys are doing something right."

Josh Abramson: The Boring One

Tragically, however, Humorist Zach Klein will no longer be participating in the fun. His last day is Friday. Zach's going solo to "socialize offline," which is a move we'd recommend for everyone in this business, even those who haven't made a fortune from pictures of passed-out college slags. Best wishes to Zack. Also of note: College Humor founder Ricky Van Veen drives a Prius.

E-Mail From Our Office Manager [Get Excited]
Going Solo [Zach Klein]

One of the burger competitors (and sharemate with Leventhal) was Mo Koyfman, who kind of serves as a chaperone to College Humor on behalf of their boss, Barry Diller. It's weird that he was grilling cheeseburgers, since he's supposedly kosher. Anyway, he lost.

Schoeneman even brought her gay albino housecleaner Marco, who cleaned during the party. Momofuku's David Chang was there with Frankie's Spuntino owner Frank Falcinelli as a judge, as was Peter Meehan of the Times. Ken Friedman of the Spotted Pig showed up too late to judge anything. This girl I went to N.Y.U. with was there and now she is married to Bob Vila's son, Chris. That made me feel old. [Ed. Note: Jesus Christ, you're like 12, Josh.]

That goofy-looking actor from 30 Rock, Lonny Ross, was there with his cute girlfriend. And though the party was first reported on New York magazine's Grub Street, its editor Josh Ozersky was noticeably absent, or not-invited. Chalk that up to the fact that David Chang and a few of the other attendees absolutely hate him.

[Photo: Ricky Van Veen/Flickr]

Last night, the boys were all wearing matching astronaut suits, as was Playboy writer Deb Shoeneman, who seemed to have elected herself the kids' naughty babysitter. Why astronaut suits? "I want to go to Mars. I've already been to the moon, but I haven't been to Mars yet," explained College Humor tyke Ricky Van Veen, who was maybe on something.

Maybe everyone was on something. Why else were so many people there? It pretty clearly had nothing to do with the book, which was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was the hot chicks! There were at least three of them cavorting in the pool. Were they hot, though? It was a matter of some debate. One person said the Asian one was the hottest. Another pointed out a teenaged brunette with a truly admirable ass. No one pointed out Sarah Schneider, who was splashing around in an athletic halter bikini as she alternated between trying to dunk her pasty, flabby College Humor colleagues and joining them in an odd kind of dance. You know the dance where you smack an imaginary ass that's in front of you? That one. She happily got out of the pool and clambered up the stadium-style stone steps to answer some questions about what it's like to be the only girl at College Humor.

"Actually, I'm not the only girl in the office. There are like five or six other girls," Sarah said, then clarified that these girls were in advertising or something. Sarah is a writer. She writes for College Humor about, among other things, scoring catfights ("hair pulling +1)." Sarah said that she definitely doesn't consider herself a feminist, but before she got a chance to explain exactly why she thinks men and women shouldn't be equal in the eyes of the law, a man had emerged, dripping, from the pool in order to try to get Sarah back in the water. He put his hand on Sarah's knee, sort of on her upper thigh, and tugged gently. "That's Josh, our intern! He's so great," said Sarah. "Sarah's great!" said Josh. "Sometimes we worry when we make dude jokes, because we think she'll be offended. But she never is." "These guys are like my brothers," said Sarah, and got back in the pool.

A few minutes later, a very young girl in a very small, fashion-y black one-piece pulled herself out of the water. She scanned the room quickly. Though the open bar had ended, the photographers were still there in the corner. She rooted through a pile of clothes and towels near the water's edge, searching for something. A few moments later, she was strutting across the room towards the stairs to the bar, teetering on the slick stone in pair of black patent stillettos that matched her suit perfectly. She walked past a man trying to push his fat friend into the water and another man who was drunkenly inhaling a slice of pizza. The girl in the black bathing suit didn't trip, but she sure wobbled badly. —Emily

DScho Photos [Flickr]
Faking It [Manhattan Society]

Most people are surprised to find out I didn't go to college. I have a feeling it has nothing to do with my intelligence level and everything to do with my alcohol tolerance levels, and the fact I casually explain my bastardized Australian-Canadian-Southern-Californian accent by saying "Oh, I went to school in Canada". Well, I did. I went to HIGH SCHOOL in Canada so really, it's not that much of a lie ... I also lost my virginity to a University of Alberta computer science major, so that has to count for something, right? As a result, I missed out on the whole "college experience". The bingeing, the date rape, the mountain of student debt, the thankless entry-level job at some internet company that will take forever to bust out of. To quench my curiosity, I decided to forego my evening of sleep to check out this whole "rush" thing. I ran home to Brooklyn, showered, changed, came back to SoHo and walked downtown with what seemed like most of the Gawker office. We descended like vultures upon the College Humor loft. Upon entering, my thoughts were as follows:

a) Holy shit, I thought Denton's apartment was amazing.
b) Holy fuck, I've never seen so many dudes in my life.

Seriously, it was a festival of sausages. With beer. And beer pong. And beer bongs. And sick views and a ... what? A fucking grand piano? Are you fucking KIDDING me? These kids are ridiculous. I managed to shelve my self-loathing, find the bar, grab my notebook, and start talking to people. I'm not that good at this part without Kate. She's the opener, I'm the closer. Actually, no, she's both of those things, but somewhere in the middle I make an inappropriate/embarrassing comment, and then she cleans up my mess. Kate's not here, she's stuck in a cab uptown. I finish that beer and start another one and realize a few more things:

a) Hey, I actually know a lot of people here.
b) Most Some of the girls that are here who aren't my friends are surprisingly bland-looking.
c) Jesus CHRIST, there are a lot of dudes here, a lot of whom are surprisingly attractive.

You'd think that those hoochy girls you hear about who hang out at clubs in Murray Hill and in Chelsea would be all over this shit. Before I got here, I was ready to blend in to the wall with my beige pants, unwilling to deal with the hoards of IJCs getting naked and dancing on couches but no-o-o-o-o-o-o, there are maybe seven guys for every girl here and given that equation, my chances are AWESOME, right?

Then I remember I'm here to "work", not pick up guys. So, in true Heather fashion, I put on my invisible self-cockblocking armor, locate the recently-arrived Kate, and talk to some fucking people. I have no idea what the party was for, something about a book or some funding these kids got because clearly, they need more fucking money. These guys are B-R-O-K-E.

At some point, Richard's battery dies, and Kate puts down her camera long enough for us to lose at beer pong. She's not shooting photos anymore, she's doing ice luge and beer bongs. I make Ben Lerer from Thrillist buy me pretzels, which I don't eat. The College Humor boys are pouring beer all over themselves and each other. Someone is drawing on someone else's face. And I am, well, drunk. My pool of friends thin out little by little, until we're the only ones left. The boys that live there are changing, at the fridge, drinking juice straight out of the bottle. 11 p.m. has somehow became 2 a.m. and we are THOSE FUCKING PEOPLE. We leave, amusing our cab driver all the way up to the UES because clearly, we are too drunk to function. Or talk.

This morning, I woke up and cried for what I think I've missed out on by not going to college — perhaps the best parties, the worst drunk hookups, the nonexistence of hangovers. Maybe the tears were for the fact that I'd woken up in my underwear, next to Kate, both of us wearing matching College Humor Rush 2007 t-shirts, but most likely they were because my head, it fucking hurts.

PS: Nick, who wrote such dirty things in my notebook: call me. For serious.

College Humor Rush 2007 [Photos]