Time Warner Cable will pay shareholders a $10.9 billion dividend as part of its spinoff from Time Warner, which will get $9.25 billion as its portion. With that cash in the bank, will Time Warner-Yahoo negotiations heat up? Last we heard, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes were negotiating a deal that would merge AOL and Yahoo and give Time Warner 20 percent control over the new company. According to Bewkes, the new cash could result in "disciplined acquisitions." Bewkes also acknowledged that AOL-Yahoo "discussions are going on." But here's the thing: as much as Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang might prefer merging with AOL rather than selling out as a whole or in splinters to Microsoft, it's not really up to him anymore, is it?

AOL's dirty dealings are all in the past, right? With the SEC filing charges against eight former AOL Time Warner execs for their roles in inflating AOL's online ad revenue between 2000 and 2002, that's no doubt what present management would like you to think. Former head of business affairs David Colburn, former controller James MacGuidwin, and two others agreed to settlements and will pay back all ill-gotten gains with interest. The four others — former division CFOs John Michael Kelly and Joseph Ripp, executive Steven Rindner, and accountant Mark Wovsaniker — will contest the SEC's charges. The charges stem from an investigation the Washington Post began in 2002, which revealed that as it merged with Time Warner, AOL's business-affairs group completed a series of unconventional deals in order to boost its online ad sales numbers. In July 2002, the Post reported:

As AOL closes its $850 million Bebo acquisition today, the biggest loser in the deal — other than the many Time Warner execs who hate the acquisition — has to be Yahoo, which is losing its answer to the partnerships between Google and MySpace and Microsoft and Facebook. When Yahoo won the deal to manage social network Bebo's display and video advertising in the U.K. and Ireland last September, part of Yahoo's triumph was getting an inside shot at Bebo's global business. Bebo CEO Joanna Shields said she was keen to see it happen. Not anymore. Don't expect Bebo to renew its current deal with Yahoo, which expires in September 2009, either.

Former CEO of PurchasePro Charles Johnson is facing 20 years in jail for his role in stock fraud at the company. An earlier prosecution of Johnson ended in mistrial, but this retrial included the original allegations plus an obstruction of justice charge related to the first effort. The Las Vegas-based PurchasePro sold enterprise software for business-to-business transactions online. PurchasePro executives worked closely with AOL dealmakers, who were implicated in the scheme to manufacture positive sales numbers in 2001 in order to puff up PurchasePro's once-astronomical stock price. AOL cut a deal earlier to defer prosecution. Other executives at PurchasePro had already plead guilty. PurchasePro went bankrupt in 2002, and the assets were scooped up by Perfect Commerce.

How badly does News Corp. want to move MySpace out the door? During yesterday's quarterly earnings call with analysts, News Corp. president and COO Pete Chernin and chairman Rupert Murdoch said they haven't discussed a merging properties with Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo in quite some time. Like maybe 14 days. Chernin: "I have not had a conversation with Microsoft or AOL in a couple of weeks." Rupert Murdoch "Nor have I." Silicon Alley Insider doesn't believe the disclaimers, reminding us that at the end of the last quarter, Murdoch denied interest in Yahoo even as he'd ordered a team to make the deal happen.

Should hookup sites come with warning labels? San Francisco and New York State public health officials have been monitoring a rise in syphilis. Their research teams believe it's connected with the popularity of social networking sites — by which they seem to mean anything with a profile page — where users can arrange casual sex. So do AOL and Craigslist bear any blame for spreading totally preventable infections? SF's Director of STD Prevention and Control, Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, says Craigslist is actually part of the solution.

Sources familiar with Microsoft tell the WSJ they expect CEO Steve Ballmer to target another large Internet company for acquisition soon. Noting that few companies have the size to boost Microsoft's business, Ballmer himself listed Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace as properties that could help Microsoft control the Internet as it did the personal computer. Others want Ballmer to buy AOL for its massive and cheap inventory. (What, are they pulling for a Nsync reunion tour as well?) Microsoft could easily better Yahoo's $10 billion offer for AOL, says SAI's Henry Blodget. But there's a reason AOL is cheap, people.

Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, left bored by running a social-networking startup, has much time on his hands to write excellent analyses of the tech industry. His blog post on why Microsoft-Yahoo might fall apart seems prescient in the wake of that deal's failure. But there's one odd thing about his writeup. Read this passage:

Jason Calacanis once told us that he has "all the money." He got it from selling Weblogs Inc. — home of Engadget and Autoblog, among others — to AOL for $25 million. Curious to see what kind of home that kind of money buys in Los Angeles? Check out Kara Swisher's video tour of Calacanis's guest "cottage." Watch out for the bulldogs.

"A complete structural separation of Time Warner Cable, under the right circumstances, is in the best interests of both companies' shareholders," Time Warner CEO Jeffrey L. Bewkes said in a statement this morning. The company will now rest much of its hopes on AOL's online advertising business. Yes, the one that grew 1 percent last year. [NYT]

Whispers on Wall Street predicted Time Warner would today report AOL ad revenues down 30 percent since last year, SAI reports. Didn't happen, but hold the cartwheels. AOL only grew 1 percent since the same quarter last year. Paid search and AOL's ad networks, which place ad on third-party sites, drove the growth, while declining revenue on display ads on AOL properties kept it meager. That's an unprofitable equation. Popular publishers demand high guarantees before joining ad networks. This quarter, such "traffic aquisition costs" were a primary reason for underwhelming numbers.

Ning founder Marc Andreessen is already on the record about Microsoft's proposed takeover of Yahoo: He thinks it will likely go through, and turn out to be a good deal. It's a remarkably sanguine take for someone who saw Netscape bought and destroyed by AOL. In a thorough analysis for which he dragooned two corporate lawyers, Andreessen elaborates: Yahoo has few defenses, aside from a poison pill, and Microsoft will likely succeed. For all its thoroughness, the analysis is less interesting for what it says about Microsoft-Yahoo than for what it says about Andreessen.

AOL's attempt at recreating itself as an "an ad-supported Web company" (or blog network, basically!) baffle and enrage us but they are apparently having some mild success. According to the Journal, traffic is up at AOL's new blogs many of which don't advertise their AOL connection: "It also created a half-dozen new sites that don't use the AOL name, such as a technology-focused site called Switched, a hip-hop site called BlackVoices, and a Web trend tracker called Urlesque.com, as well as Asylum." We bolded that bit because BlackVoices doesn't actually have anything to do with hip hop, except in that some black people rap and stuff. But, you know, not Sean Bell or Michelle Obama, the subjects of two of the current lead stories on that "hip-hop site." [WSJ, BlackVoices]

AOL has acquired Fantasy Football site Fleaflicker. The buy comes just days after AOL News and Sports VP Lewis Dvorkin announced plans to leave the company. [PaidContent]

Here's AOL ad network Platform-A's new logo. According to president Lynda Clarizio, it "communicates our distinct competitive advantage of scale and reach." The real message: The new logo brands Platform-A as distinct from AOL. Why? Clarizio is AOL's seventh advertising boss since 2001. The turmoil has not helped AOL rebuild relationships with Madison Avenue. The result: AOL has reported traffic to its websites was up 15 percent, and ComScore says its ad network reached 91 percent of the U.S. Internet audience in March. And yet analysts expect AOL's advertising revenues for the first quarter to be flat or down. A fresh start may help, but it won't solve AOL's problems.

Vested employees at social network Bebo, anticipating the massive stock-options payday they'll get when AOL finalizes its $850 million purchase of their employer, have been passing around stickers that read "I, for one, welcome our new AOL overlords." One was so excited that he sent it to Valleywag — and then rapidly thought better of it, fearing that this leak of sensitive information would somehow jeopardize the merger. Such typical Valley groupthink: Yes, little programmer, the fate of the entire company is riding on your shoulders! Loose lips sink acquisitions!

IAC's Connected Ventures may have done it first, and AOLers in France may have done it better, but give Digg's companywide lip-synching video credit. Skip ahead to check out Jay Adelson at 2:02. Rewind from there to see Kevin Rose Digg underlings jumping up on a conference-room table. (Founder Kevin Rose doesn't actually appear until the very end, where he declares the group "crazy" and leaves. For his future dignity, a wise move. No one has, as yet, leaked footage of Barry Diller or Randy Falco wearing shades and rapping.) Full clip is below:

Poor AOL CEO Randy Falco. He believes that acquiring the social network Bebo for $850 million put AOL in a "leading position" in social networking. Everyone else thinks the buy was a joke — including Bebo cofounder Michael Birch. Asked at an event yesterday about the purchase price, Birch said, "850 million is an interesting number. It's a lot bigger than some numbers and a lot smaller than some numbers. It's not a prime number." Asked how AOL bid itself up to $850 million, Birch said $800 million of it was due Bebo's popularity in Fiji. "Fiji is an up-and-coming market," the Birch told the crowd. Don't wonder why he's so giddy. Birch and his cofounder, his wife Xochi, earned $595 million on the deal.

Guys, we can pack it in. AOL finally finished work on their advanced blogging android, programmed to churn out and rehash Funny Internet Content in unlimited combinations. They've given their Blogbot a site called "Urlesque" and now it will set about destroying Best Week Ever, Buzzfeed, Rex Sorgatz, Gawker, Tumblr, Funny or Die, The Superficial, Stuff White People Like, Cracked, and people who forward funny things—by becoming them. It's all automated now! There's a machine in Estonia that churns out LOLcats and most "people" on Vimeo are animatronic. Jason Kottke is actually three lines of code. Activate Muxtape-creation sequence! Unleash the Diggbait List algorithm! Taze humanity, bro! YAHH TRICK YAHH! [Urlesque]

AOL will layoff "less than 500" from its Platform-A advertising division starting today. The severance packages "stink," a source tells Silicon Alley Insider . AOL calls the cuts an ongoing "alignment," not a layoff, and suggests the number headed for the street is closer to 100.