An IAC insider ... tells me that it was budgeted, at least initially, to burn through $18 million in three years, with (wildly optimistic) hopes for advertising revenue of at least $10 million in that same time. More than half of Tina's 20 or so full-time staffers were budgeted to earn $100,000 or more a year.

Got that? Tina Brown's website will spend $28 million over three years. No wonder they call it a "beast." I thought blogs were supposed to be run on the cheap. (Photo by New York Magazine)

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.

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:

Most personal-finance sites are snooze-filled, sometimes schoolmarmish affairs. Save more money! Don't you dare go out to dinner! Suffer, scrimp, suffer, scrimp. We're kind of tired of that approach, and we reckon you are, too.

Watching Wall Street's meltdown, would you be surprised if 20somethings were uninterested in qualifying for a mortgage and investing in mutual funds? Personal-finance sites are usually more motivated by luring advertisers than readers. The former are now in scarce supply, too.

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.

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.

IAC is moving ahead with plans to spin off four of its divisions by the end of August: HSN (which includes Cornerstone), Ticketmaster, Tree.com (which includes LendingTree), and Interval Leisure Group, which operates vacation sites including ResortQuest Hawaii. That leaves IAC with Ask.com, Match.com and Citysearch. What's happening? Simple: Diller and company have learned that bundling a bunch of diverse online businesses together doesn't create the promised "synergy" of the Web 1.0 boom. Better to let each site fend for itself. Since IAC got rid of Expedia in 2005 (Barry Diller's still chairman of the board), the travel site's ups and downs have closely followed the travel market. That's the watercooler version. You can wonk out with the full details.

"Please remove this script, it can only contribute to getting the site shut down," Ouellette wrote in April on Userscripts.org. "As long as you can hear the music you can copy it, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to do the diligence of trying to stop casual downloading (one of the things that would hurt its long-term viability)," he wrote on another occasion. "I was naïve enough to think assholes like you wouldn't want to wreak a good thing, but I guess I was wrong," he concluded.

He's been quieter since then, aside from suggesting the site would drop the popular MP3 format in an effort to stop downloaders. The scripters have kept up their efforts.

Not that this cat-and-mouse game matters. The RIAA has wisely left Muxtape alone, avoiding an ugly publicity squabble over a site that has yet to show any commercial potential. If it does begin to show some financial success, then the music-industry lawyers will swoop in demanding money.

People are swift to criticize the RIAA, which has made a number of boneheadedly unpopular moves. But what should we say about the naivete of entrepreneurs like Ouellette, who are hoping that battling Firefox script kiddies will somehow count in their favor when the record labels come knocking? Muxtape's lawyers might make a "safe harbor" argument under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act — but that requires showing that Ouellette was unaware of copyright violations on the site. Hard to argue that, when he uses it himself.

Fraps are easy to shoot — just click record while playing a game on your PC. A 10-minute session at HD quality makes for a Godzilla-sized video file to upload to Vimeo.

But filespace isn't the only issue. Management is refreshingly blunt: Vimeo was meant to be a site to share personal real-world movie camera work with friends and family. Dammit, you kids with your Grand Theft Auto 4 clips are ruining everything. Starting in September, Vimeo will delete previously uploaded fraps and ban new ones. Its users, meanwhile, will just decamp to WeGame.com.

Unsurprisingly, there's already signs of trouble. MainStreet has lost its launch editor, Caroline Waxler, amid a change of editorial direction. FiLife has ratcheted back its once-lofty ambitions. And WalletPop? One of a bevy of websites launched by AOL, which is desperate to find readers who are not turned off by that once-magical, now-deadly three-letter brand. With few prospects for attracting an audience or advertisers, will they not soon need financial advice of their own?

CollegeHumor's clips are occasionally brilliant; they can earn their links through merit, not pageview payola. I'd hope they'd apply the same principle to us. We may be leaving money off the table, but something about this scheme's method of keeping score rubs me the wrong way. I'll hold onto the hope that this is CollegeHumor's most elaborate prank yet, and I've been taken in.

Update: The joke really is on me. CollegeHumor's Josh Abrahamson writes to inform me that through our publisher, Gawker Media, Valleywag's been participating in this program since last summer. I'm going to go take a bath now.

He's posted the above image — details of an apparent deal with the devil — to his blog, titling it "For personal reference only, please don’t read!" He's gently mocking his former charge, Ouellette, who accidentally emailed terms of his own deal with the devilishly pranky Lodwick to his blog instead of his own inbox. We're hoping Pile's gag keeps running, and encourage you to accidentally leak all your deals to us.

Pile is in the comfortable position of being able to mock Lodwick, Vimeo's Iconoclastic founder, because according to one source, he's largely responsible for saving the site, growing its traffic 600 percent in the last 8 months. What's Pile done so well? Our source says Pile has kept his team focused on improving Vimeo's usability with tweaks here and there, increasing traffic in 5 and 10 percent bumps that have really added up. But also, our source says, Pile's done a very good job of not being Jakob Lodwick, whose "focuses were kind of on the wrong things."

The suits, it turns out. Without Lodwick at the helm, Vimeo's gone from a flatlining also-ran to a fast-growing alternative to YouTube. NewTeeVee reports that Vimeo traffic more than doubled from February to May. Guess Lodwick just wasn't cut out to be a Killer Diller, after all.

I posted something I didn't mean to yesterday. Pretty embarrassing. I meant to email it to myself, but my reflexes directed me to Tumblr (which is where I’m emailing photos from my phone 99% of the time). Oh, internet. Always double check.

Oops! Doesn't this make you feel better about the time you sent that instant message to your coworker after he'd been chewed out by your boss, saying, "Sorry about that. She gets cranky sometimes," only to realize you'd accidentally sent it to your boss? It does for me!

Foolish disregard for his severance agreement aside, one has to ask this about Lodwick: What kind of entrepreneur or investor puts his deal terms online, in napkin or any other form? That's an easy one: the same kind of entrepreneur or investor who would relentlessly blog his sad relationship with noted New York nobody Julia Allison, quit the Internet over its injustices, rejoin the Internet in an effort to spread Ayn Rand's message, and then, in a huff for the ages, quit the Internet once more.

Update: Ouellette has taken the memo down, saying he posted it to the Web by accident.

More videos capture the 2008 Taipei 101 New Year fireworks display than any other on the Internet. See why.

Fireworks are best viewed at 30,000 feet.







Fireworks at 30,000 ft from Chris Bodenner on Vimeo.

Portland Rose Festival Fireworks! Click through to watch it in HD on Vimeo.







Portland Rose Festival Fireworks! from Andrew Curtis on Vimeo.

The Brooklyn Bridge 125th anniversary fireworks — click through to watch it in HD on Vimeo.







Brooklyn Bridge 125th Anniversary Grucci Fireworks from Craig Seeman on Vimeo.

The Fourth of July scene from The Sandlot.

Apparently the last 24 Inch Fireworks Shell exploded in the States.

Fire Works 4th Of July 2007 Washington DC — the nation's capital.

More Fireworks in HD.







Fireworks HV20 from Vedran on Vimeo.

A 36 inch shell exploded in daylight.

This is called a 625 Shot Dragon Egg Fireworks cake and its completely insane.

(Photo by Mr Magoo ICU)

those who researched expensive restaurants on Citysearch, declared incomes of $100,000-plus on Match.com, bought tickets to the symphony via Ticketmaster, browsed $700,000 homes on RealEstate.com or searched for luxury products on Gifts.com.

Web companies are obsessed with this kind of demographic slicing and dicing in an effort to convince advertisers that it doesn't matter what kind of content they put their ads against, so long as the audience looking at that content is the one they want to reach. Some might say that after precision accountability, demographic-based targeting is the Internet's greatest promise. So far, advertisers seem to prefer putting their ads against quality content.

Legal wrangling over the splitup of Barry Diller's online conglomerate; a bitter spat between Diller and longtime backer John Malone of Liberty Media delayed the breakup. Gifts.com used to be run out of online retailer HSN, which is due to be separated; that left it headless, a good fit for the jobless. It's a good move for Rapp; we hear he'd been considering a junior position at Facebook, or running IAC's healthcare investments. Gifts.com may not be much — Compete.com lists its audience at below 1 millon, after a predictable spike in December — but at least Rapp gets a C-suite title.

Dear Facebook, Looking forward to Thursday. Your winning percentage will be even lower than your click-through rates. Love, CollegeHumor

Six Apart's offices seem pretty ordinary to me. Their meeting space is *tiny*. Googleplex's niceties are all about enticing their workers to stay at work longer — yeah, that's real HAWT!. Valleywag offices look like a dump to me.

Click on each company name for its full galleries.

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• Tech's top 10 workspaces
• Tocquigny
• Six Apart
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• Googleplex
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Digg Dubb: Groove Is In The Heart from Trammell on Vimeo.

BEASTIALITY from HolyHoly on Vimeo.

Former Vimeo Web designer Justin Ouellette quit Connected Ventures on April 4 to work full-time on Muxtape. Ouellette says he's Muxtape's CEO and founder. In his blog post announcing the project, Lodwick claimed he was "hired" by Ouellette.

But we hear that Muxtape is just as much Jakob Lodwick's company as it Ouellette's. Lodwick may well be footing the bills. After Muxtape's first day, Ouellete wrote that server costs had already reached $118.17. Ouellette can't afford that kind of charge for very long, from what we hear about his finances. Lodwick, who with three other cofounders sold Connected Ventures to IAC, can.

And likely does. We're not surprised. Since shortly he left Connected Ventures, Lodwick has publicly sought to own and operate a music service on the Web. Lodwick is also an active investor in Web services he appreciates — such as David Karp's Tumblr. Lodwick has also served as Muxtape's chief marketer since its launch. (Our coverage of the company began when Lodwick posted about Muxtape nine days before Ouellette quit Connected Ventures.)

Asked if it's good for Connected Ventures and IAC to have departed execs poaching current employees for new startups, Connected Ventures president Josh Abramson told us, "No, it definitely isn't. But to the best of my knowledge that isn't what happened."

If Abramson's knowledge suddenly expands in the coming days, Lodwick wouldn't be the first engineer to get in hot water for poaching talent from an old company while starting a new one. Netscape founder Jim Clark hired away top Silicon Graphics engineers when he started Healtheon. But perhaps Jakob Lodwick isn't Jim Clark and Muxtape merely rhymes with Netscape.

Barry sent out an email to corporate last night saying the case will be this week, everything will be fine, iac's stock been doing really well thanks to everyone at IAC corporate etc. I don't have a copy but if you know someone there who can get you one, might be interesting to read in a Dr. Pangloss kind of way.

As I'm sure most of you are aware, IAC will be in court this week to resolve a business dispute with Liberty Media related to how we implement our planned spin-offs. The trial will begin tomorrow in Delaware, and is expected to run through the end of the week. The media has not surprisingly become enchanted with this dispute, so I expect a fair amount of press coverage during the process attempting to paint the trial as going one way or the other. Please do your best to ignore it. I will try as well but probably fail.

At the end of the day, it's purely a business dispute. We are highly confident in our legal position and are looking forward to proving our case to the judge. But, whatever the outcome, you have much to be proud of. And no one, including those seeking to dramatize this dispute with generic and often wrongheaded characterizations of our Company, can or should take that away from you.