1. People. Board, consultants, employees are passionate about the turnaround. “people at AOL are playing to win.

2. Predicts a massive platform battle in Silicon Valley. Content is the new glue that holds the Internet together.

3. “it’s time for the Internet to get programmed”

4. Brands matter a lot so the content future won’t be Mom & Pop

5. Content Platforms can be good or bad. Does not see AOL as a “content farm”

6. AOL will develop content that looks different

7. Great strategy a la Tom Brady, “throw it to the open guy”

8. Would AOL buy Yahoo? Doesn’t sound like it

Aspen, CO — Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Barry Diller made an impassioned plea to the nation’s technology leaders to join the fight for net neutrality. Speaking at the Fortune Magazine Brainstorm Tech Conference at the Aspen Institute, Diller, CEO of Interactive Corporation (IAC) took on the big telco’s desire to control the gateways to the Internet.

Interviewed by Fortune Managing Editor, Andy Serwer Diller went on to declare his “love” for the iPad. He added that he did not love his iPad as much as his dog.

Diller believes that over time, the pay wall concept currently deployed by The New York Times will work. Media companies should be experimenting with all platforms and pay models. Diller also took on google over it’s market share.

Finally, answering a question about TV, he believes that broadcast media will begin to be available on a paid basis.

They did it to music – now what about TV? ReadWriteWeb reports that the BBC wants to prevent piracy, ad removal, and illegal copying by encoding all listing metadata and using a compression
algorithm to limit playing abilities. In other words – DRM for TV content.

Danny O'Brien gets into the details of the "crazy" plan over on the Electronic Frontier Foundation blog, but the gist is this: the rightsholders want copy-protection technology built into every TV receiver device, and make manufacturers sign an agreement that would ultimately limit their ability to innovate, for fear of violating the "metadata compression parameter" license.

Rewind 5 years and change continents: here in the US of A the same measure was suggested by the FCC and the Motion
Picture Association of America, trying to force HD encryption on digital television, before we transitioned from analog. The court wasn't convinced, and the idea was thrown out.

Even if they had succeeded, the rise of open source TV services like Boxee means that people could watch protected programs at home, just not via their HC receiver. A Boxee spokesperson remarks, "The way for content owners to make money is to cater to their audience,
not to stifle innovation by creating a DRM racket like what's proposed
here." Square off, guys.

Oh where oh where could my little iPhone be?

Asia, man. Asia. It’s where lots of little sheep, I mean gadgets, run off to. In this case, they estimate 1.7 million iPhones that have not been activated in the States may have buggered off to other countries for unregistered, unlocked use. Six months ago, when a six-man team from iPhoneSIMfree.com "cracked open" the iPhone for use outside of the AT&T network in the US, and Europeans and Asians the world around clasped their hands in joy.

Ryan Block on Engadget said, "It’s done. Seriously. They wouldn’t tell us when and how
they would release it to the public, but you can certainly bet that
they’ll try to make a buck on their solution (and rightly so). We can
hardly believe the iPhone’s finally been cracked. No, scratch that –
we just can’t believe it took this long." Well Glory Hallelujah.

Why do we care? When little guys find clever ways to outsmart The Man, to chip away at the big profits of big companies, who really wins? Does Apple really lose that much? (No, says Saul Hansell in the NYTimes blog. They still get 50 bucks from each phone, sans activation.) Let’s take this lesson with us as we cheer on U2 in their battle against music piracy as they attack the big guys. Am I talking about big music producers?  Of course not. U2 manager Paul McGuinness blames the ISP providers. Oh, those big guys.

According the the Financial Times, he told
delegates at the music industry’s international trade show in France that they had "concerned themselves for too long with
the small fries who organised illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing on the
internet," suggesting that "we shift
the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P file thief and
on to the multibillion dollar industries that benefit from these
countless tiny crimes. The ISPs, the telcos, the device-makers.” (You gotta wonder how they translated "small fries" for French-speaking attendees.)

He then called for a partnership in the future with the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Comcast, and even Facebook, to work together to fight pirates.  Right.

Well, not really. That’s the problem with webcasts. You have no idea how many people are actually attending. It could be hundreds, thousands, but it could also be tens, ones. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but that’s one of the things about virtual education that may be sadly disappearing. Unlike the attentive(?) and engaged (??) ad:tech panel crowds, webcast audiences are not all in one place, doodling in their notebooks, gasping in amazement, or boo-ing and hissing — at opportune moments, of course.

But I doubt we’d get much reaction from the non-virtual audience of B2B’s Media Business Webcast dealing with Online Content. Moderated by B2B’s Matthew Schwartz, and featuring 3 distinguished panelists in the areas of publishing, social media, and digital distribution, the webcast was worth not its salt but maybe 40 minutes worth of pepper. And the fact that you could listen to them while lounging on your loveseat or chowing down on Mixt Greens made it all the better. Still, like most presentations, you can’t help but zone out during the parts that are ‘uninteresting’ or simply not relevant to your own personal situation. And not to sound too adult, too business-y, but we just can’t afford to waste time on information that we don’t need. It got me craving a search engine for webcasts. Imagine, you have 30 minutes free in the middle of the afternoon, and have been meaning to do some research on Agile Development, but are feeling rather lazy and can’t conduct that search all by your lonesome. So you type it into the Webcast portal and voilà! a plethora of panelist speakers and presentations to choose from. Oh, if only…

I just got a new mp3 player. It is small, it is sharp, and I can do things on it that they would never have dreamed of in 1985. (I know, this is not really an impressive claim.) I also know that you don’t care about other people’s new gadgets – unless it is a product that you yourself are thinking of buying, and then you’ll read about a trillion reviews of it before you purchase. Or at least 1 in 4 of you will.

But let me tell you of one of the key features on this little guy that many of you all-in-one-rs out there might relate to. It’s the text reader. When I first saw it, I was like, oh cool. I can read stuff on-the-go. Granted, you’re not going to be poring over a 12-page brief on a tiny little screen, or read Baudolino in 100-word spurts. Or are you?

Amazon, not willing to give in to the Sony Reader, or the countless other gadgets out there with text capabilities, has come out with a $399 Kindle — a replacement for that long-honored but perhaps tired item, The Book. "Books are the last bastion of analog," declared  Amazon’s Jeff Kozos to a Newsweek reporter. The article, which explores the concept of making long-form reading truly digital. A debate will surely ensue.

Some Newsweek readers have already pointed out their issues with it, like lack of illustrations (rendering books about Frank Lloyd Wright or Michelangelo practically useless) or that ‘glue, ink, and paper’ feel. Other more practical issues are those of cost: like many first-generation models, there are kinks in the woodwork and people will most likely hold out for reworked versions rather than jump to buy their dears a Kindle for this holiday season. Strange, too, their marketing campaign. It hasn’t reached anybody who’s anybody, as far as I can see. In fact, just this morning I received the High-Tech Gift for the Holidays from Amazon and guess what’s not on their Top 20 list?  Right on. Their own Kindle.

In the same vein, but slightly more interesting, is what’s going on in China with digital books. Moshimo Komiga, a twisting tale of high school romance, was composed entirely on a mobile phone by an "avid texter" named Rin. It’s been done before, but now more first-timers are embracing the format. Sounds about right for China, who is gobbling up technology like a starved cat. And not hesitating to put themselves really out there. Out there, as in online. An IAC/JWT study (via CNN Money) showed that Chinese youth are leaping ahead even American youth in their consumption and personal expression through digital channels.

‘Twill be interesting to see what happens as the Tweens – who are actually spending more time on their mobiles, and less time on the Internet than the Teens – grow up and gain more spending power. Mobile marketing may be it. And text readers, combined with mobile phone technology, may be even it-ter.

You’ve got these four choices staring you in the face. Which do
you choose?

1.  E-commerce

2.  Communications

3.  Content

4.  Search 

B2B
reports that 47% of online time is
spent with content, compared with 34% four years ago, according to the
Online Publishing Association’s four-year analysis of its Internet Activity
Index (IAI).

Content experienced a 37% gain in share, closely followed by
search with 35%, but the amount of time for search is still only 5%. And email,
which used to be the leader, has faltered down to a measly 33% of the total
time. Widespread broadband access and a tendency to consume breaking news
online were marked as some of the factors, but as Wendy Davis observes,

Still, despite the possible growth in online news articles,
it seems likely that the main reason for the shift is the result of the recent explosion of Web video sites,
ranging from YouTube to Joost to TV networks’ own sites.

AdWeek
ran a piece on Deloitte & Touche’s "State of the Media
Democracy" report that talked of old media’s
resilience, particularly in video. “One of the main activities online is
going to a television Web site." harks Ed Moran, their director of product
innovation. The survey found that around half of consumers across generations
check them out regularly, and the same amount consumes user-generated content.
(Are they one and the same? Probably. The rest are still flipping channels and
fast-forwarding through commercials.)

Yes,
skipping commercials. With this content-crazy mad throng of Internet users
comes yet more ad avoidance. More than a quarter said they would pay for online
content in exchange for not being exposed to advertising. But more and more
content providers are ‘setting their sites’ on ad-supported video. Worth a read
is the WSJ article, Are Skins,
Bugs or Tickers The Holy Grail of Web Advertising? to see how different companies
are emerging from the age of experimentation and using data from the past year
to “crack the video advertising code.”

Yahoo! profits are down 61% over the previous quarter as reported in the Washington Post today.  The portal appears to be losing ground not just in search but also in display advertising.  Both outcomes were predictable and neither means that online advertising or Yahoo! for that matter are headed for any kind of serious decline. 

Yes, Google’s search program is more popular and yes, MySpace and YouTube have hurt Yahoo! but let’s look at the larger picture.  The idea that Yahoo! wouldn’t or even shouldn’t lose market share is preposterous.  As new players and new money come into the market, a diffusion of dollars to innovative and micro-targeted content has been inevitable for some time.

There is no sign that the spigot of dollars falling out of more traditional media into online won’t continue unabated for several more years.  In fact, even in a recession, we believe more dollars will head to the Internet as advertisers will seek ever more targeting and accountability.

So — Yahoo! probably needs to make some acquisitions, it needs to be sure that Panama is good enough to capture some market share from Google and Microsoft but we’re not digging any graves just yet.  As pricing for search on Google closes more and more advertisers out, Yahoo! is well positioned to pick up the slack.