Ad Age reports (via) that Silverman might take over CollegeHumor at the behest of Barry Diller, who bankrolls both CollegeHumor and Silverman's new online venture. Van Veen, meanwhile. is transitioning out of CollegeHumor and into his own Diller-funded media startup, Notional, which sounds a lot like Silverman's Electus (both have something to do with online video production).

We're told Silverman and Van Veen have been working very closely together and talking to each other every day. Perhaps a grander merger is in the works that would combine Electus, Notional and CollegeHumor into one venture. Silverman may have been ousted from old media, but he could still be lord of the new media flies. Especially within a venture that actually celebrates a refusal to mature, an inability to grow emotionally and a proclivity for partying to excess. Those are Ben Silverman's specialties, right there.

(Pics: via Getty, Webbyist)

Diller will play sugar daddy to Notional; the IAC chairman will fold it into his ConnectedVentrues division, alongside CollegeHumor.com. The video content will be similar — cheap to make, zeitgeisty — but on television proper rather than the Web. Read: Potentially more lucrative. Reports PaidContent:

The focus will be unscripted programming, broader than comedy aimed at young males that they have been known for, and will include all genres.

Van Veen will report directy to Diller. The elder mogul has run Paramount, Fox and USA Broadcasting and no doubt relishes the chance to bestow his knowledge on an adoring young acolyte. One imagines Diller might become something of a father to Van Veen. Or perhaps more like a stepfather.

(Pic: Van Veen, by Nick Gray)

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.

A 2008 study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds:

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it.

So for now, guys, stick to the videos. Though we'll be coming for those next.

So we did only what had to be done. As the local outpost of a Valley institution, we took on CollegeHumor's best and beeriest where Facebook would not. We are pleased to announce, readers, that with our dazzling ping-pong ball throwing skills, Valleywag handily defeated CollegeHumor cofounder Ricky Van Veen's minions. (In perhaps related news, some employees of our parent company, Gawker Media, participated in a larger beer-pong tournament against CollegeHumor and emerged much less victorious, but much more drunk.)

"We had a feast and all turned out well," reports CollegeHumor cofounder Ricky Van Veen, who described the buffet as "pizzas, mozz sticks, and wings". Nobody tell Facebook's ex-Google chef Josef Desimone, though, as we have a sneaking opinion the mozzarella wasn't organic and locally sourced from within a 100-mile radius. (Photo by Ricky Van Veen)

Facebook's PR and Legal dept said they can't participate. I guess that's what its like working in corporate America as opposed to a fun Internet company.

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

Lucky for them, they're one of CollegeHumor's biggest advertising clients. Though I must admit a high drama court case over "the shocker" would be a funny thing to see.

CollegeHumor is probably hawking unsold ad space to low-rent online ad networks, which opportunistic hackers use to spread viruses and infect PCs for more profitable ventures like sending out spam. Careful, Barry: Going with the cheap guys can be unsanitary.

• 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.

CenterNetworks observed that norbum.org, a domain recently purchased by Lodwick, briefly went live with the message:

Norbum.org is an open, crowd-sourced, web 2.0 application powered by Tumblr. Why the name "Norbum"? Simply put, Norbum is like Nordstrom for the homeless. We bring to you the latest in urban street fashion from the people who live it. Rather than relying on an elitist group of professional editors, we invite our readers to submit photos of the most stylish street people from around the world. If you spot one of these edgy trendsetters, just snap a photo and email it to 2tvazf87@tumblr.com. We'll post the best ones to Norbum.org.