Despite the fact it's a subject that is undoubtedly very close to his heart, we regret to inform you that Barry Diller will no longer be providing the public with advice on where to park their RVs or pitch their tents: Diller's IAC announced today that it's selling off its campground information site ReserveAmerica. Makes sense to us: We can't imagine Diane was ever any good at hunting down deer and finding sources of fresh drinking water. [Crain's]

Just last month, IAC chief Barry Diller was chiding his fellow moguls for laying workers off in a recession and spending indiscriminately. So how does he explain getting rid of 23/6, his humor site?

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 layoffs and throwing workers out into an unforgiving environment, and said now is a great time to buy companies. He also railed against "indiscriminate spending." So does Diller measure up to his own expectations? Ehhh...

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 expected to stay at IAC. And the changes, you'll be happy to hear, should have no impact on Tina Brown's extravagant new site, The Daily Beast. [AdAge]

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, for some reason with Taylor Momsen. Topping off the evening quite nicely, fashion executive Diane von Fursternberg "invited Diller... back to her place," according to Page Six, along with designer Valentino Garavani and actress Marisa Berenson. For dinner, of course. Which was awfully generous, considering that von Furstenberg is Diller's wife. Officially, at least. As Diller knows well, mergers take quite some time to integrate, and some components just never mesh at all.

Is it possible to turn on the news and not hear about another ship that's been hijacked by a bunch of Somali pirates looking to collect some extortion money? Piracy at sea hasn't generated this much public attention since the 16th century! Naturally, we don't condone these violent, criminal acts, nor do we recommend taking up a career as a pirate, even if you were just canned by a media company or investment bank and you're wondering how you're going to pay your rent next month. But if you've already made up your mind and you're planning to take the LIRR out to the Hamptons, rent a Zodiac, and take over the boat of a local billionaire—or you're just planning to pay a friendly visit and drop off your resume in person—we've put together a colorful chart of yachts owned by a bunch of notable New Yorkers, just so you make sure you're climbing aboard the right ship. Just don't blame us if you're subjected to a treatise on the economy by Steve Forbes, a lecture on Scientology by Greta Van Susteren, or a tongue-lashing by Judge Judy. The larger chart is here.

The Tribeca Film Institute hosted a benefit screening for the Quantum of Solace last night, which was followed by an afterparty at Tavern on the Green. Attendees included Daniel Craig, Becki Newton, Chris Diamantopoulos, Robert De Niro and Grace Hightower, Craig Hatkoff and Jane Rosenthal, Julia Stiles, Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Jeffrey Wright, Debra Messing, Andre Balazs, Andrew Saffir and Daniel Benedict, Hoda Kotb, Jill Stuart, John Sykes, Judy McGrath, Howard Stringer, Rob Wiesenthal, Liya Kebede, Stewart Rahr, Molly Sims, and Serena Altschul. [PMc, Wireimage, GoaG]

Tina Brown appeared on Fox Business today to chat about her new site, the Daily Beast. It turns out that credit for the venture goes to Barry Diller, who, Brown says, was having trouble finding anything worthwhile to read on the Web and brought the idea to Tina because he wanted someone he could trust to tell him what to read every day. Oh, and don't be fooled by the title of the segment, "The Battle of the Blogs," or the lead-in, which suggests she's giving the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report a run for their money. She isn't competing with anyone. "It's not a competitive situation... it's a collegial model."

♦ 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 issue. [NYP]
♦ Can The Daily Show survive an Obama presidency? and how will other media outlets deal with the post-election dropoff? [Politico, AdAge]
♦ An explanation of that holography thingie on CNN last night. [YouTube]

Steve Schwarzman's 60th birthday party last year may go down as the last, great party before the fall. Days after closing on what was then the biggest leveraged buyout in history, the $39 billion purchase of Equity Office Properties, the billionaire chairman of the Blackstone Group invited 500 people to the Armory on Park Avenue for a party that cost an estimated $3 million. A very long list of notables turned up—Donald Trump, Barbara Walters, Barry Diller, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon—as did many of the people who have now become poster boys for the global financial crisis, like former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal, ex-Bear Stearns chief Jimmy Cayne. Rod Stewart was paid $1 million to perform for the assembled guests; Patti LaBelle sang "Happy Birthday." And the room was designed to replicate Schwarzman's $40 million co-op at 740 Park Avenue. So does Schwarzman have any regrets now the economy has crumbled and he was depicted as a real-life Gordon Gekko in the relentless press coverage that followed?

· The End of Ideas: It's Time to Redo Hellraiser Edition. French horror director Pascal Laugier is in final negotiations to direct a "re-imagining of Hellraiser" for Dimension. Laugier reassured Cliver Barker fans that he "would never betray what [Barker] has done," and to look forward to a mostly faithful adaptation starring a new icon of horror, Velcroface. [THR] · Barry Diller will vote YES on Obama, and NO on Prop 16, an initiative titled Eliminates Right of Media Moguls to Carry On Marriages of Convenience with Noted Fashion Designers. [THR] · Robert Downey Jr. has agreed to star as Tony Stark in the next two Iron Mans and The Avengers, the last of which is scheduled for release on July 15, 2011, aka International Fanboy Pants-Crapping Day. [Variety] After the jump: Vince Vaughn is ready to tackle his most dramatic role since Norman Bates.· Sony reported a 72% profit drop, a loss attributed to the weakening U.S. dollar and [Variety] · Vince Vaughn will star in Sunny and 68, from Pride and Glory writer/director Gavin O'Connor, a "drama with comedic undertones" about a guy who goes to his childhood home a bottomed-out poker champion, but emerges a man. [Variety]

♦ Details on the layoffs and management changes at Time Inc. [NYP]
♦ More on the demise of Maer Roshan's Radar and its God-awful TMZ-like reincarnation. [NYO, HuffPo]
♦ Fox News has apologized for putting a racist and anti-Semite on the air. [MM]
♦ Noted media expert (and former basketball player) Charles Barkley thinks Fox News is "corrupt." [B&C]
♦ Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial airs tonight. [AdAge, Politico]

Internet publishers Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown may both be foreign transplants to the U.S., but there's little question which of the two fifty-somethings has more fully assimilated her site to the democratic rough-and-tumble of American Web culture. It was Huffington who offered blogs to five virtual strangers over the course of two days, as documented in the New Yorker earlier this month, including "the Asperger’s-afflicted teen-age son of a radio d.j." and "a woman, dressed exclusively in green, who was trying to stop insecticide spraying." Brown, in contrast, has lent her Daily Beast a distinctly royalist feel, as one might expect from a Commander of the British Empire. And the former New Yorker editor played the snob angle for all it was worth in a lengthy interview with Portfolio's Lloyd Grove:

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 off by IAC. If I had to bet, I'd say these cuts have as much to do with removing the layers of cruft which accumulated under years of flitty mismanagement by IAC CEO Barry Diller as they do with the economy.

Diane von Furstenberg is a noted fashion designer, responsible for creating the looks-good-on-every-woman wrap dress. She is also married to IAC's Barry Diller—who is, for his part, a noted homosexual! DVF has created a comic book for DC Comics called The Adventures of Diva, Viva, and Fifa, in which "we find Diane herself (a little younger than she is today), who brings us inside the unique world of Diva, Viva and Fifa..." Check out the comixx after the jump!Here are a couple pages. Not totally sure what's going on in them! But these ladies' problems are clearly of the fabulous kind.

Though she's a newcomer to the internet, Tina Brown has spent a lifetime honing her ability to self-promote. Which is how the former Vanity Fair editor seemed to have instinctively grasped what was expected of her last night on the Colbert Report: sell the sizzle, not the steak when it comes to her new internet venture, the Daily Beast — and remember that no points are deducted for going a bit over the top, per the self-parodying bloviations of host Stephen Colbert. When it came time to discuss the Beast's central role in getting Christopher Buckley fired from National Review, Brown couldn't just say the incident was exciting — no, she had to claim it turned the whole office into a party! Lest anyone think she was joking, Brown again mentioned how much the firing thrilled her a few breaths later. Brown, who has herself done away with plenty of magazine writers, may be learning the nuts and bolts of the Web on the job, but her gleeful, shameless bloodlust may yet reveal her as a natural for the medium. For proof, click the video icon to watch the attached clip.

Is The Daily Beast Tina Brown's clever homage to Evelyn Waugh's fictional newspaper or an inadvertent description of the new website's voracious financial appetite? The web property needs $18m from Barry Diller's IAC to fund its next three years, according to Simon Dumenco.

Buried in a Wall Street Journal interview with Barry Diller, CEO of the ever-shifting Internet conglomerate IAC, which owns Ask.com and some other websites, was a nugget of insight revealing what Diller thinks of the people who invest in his company. Asked about IAC's stock performance, he replied:The truth is the market made judgments, and the recent judgments have been poor. There were legitimate reasons for that. Now, there are operating facts about this company that are irrefutable: It has revenue, it has earnings, it has a lot of cash and no debt.

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 doesn't succeed, it tries, tries, tries again. But you can't blame the market, or users, for finding all this trying, well, trying.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.