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…

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…

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,…

♦ 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…

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…

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:

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…