Tina Brown unveiled this morning her new internet venture, the Daily Beast. The Post's Keith Kelly said the website, a revival of the fictional paper in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, is in the "soft launch phase," meaning apparently that it's devoid of advertisers, and that it "sees itself as a must-read for hipsters in news, politics and pop culture." Ahem. From our quick look — it temporarily went password protected as we were reading — the site seemed more noteworthy for its slavish devotion to internet publishing memes than for any particular innovation. Some traffic-baiting Apple coverage? Yes, there's a column by former Think Secret publisher Nicholas Ciarelli. Celebrity contributors? Sure, if you count the likes of Bill Clinton, who mails in book recommendations, and Project Runway alumna Laura Bennett, who posted a column. There's counterintuitive, Slate-like material such as "Why I Call My Wall Street Patients Pussies," by an ostensibly caring psychiatrist. And, as if to prove she is now truly blogger, Brown concludes her debut column with the one-word sentence, "Heh." Soon she'll emailing Digg requests to her old publishing friends and trying to get to 10,000 friends on Facebook, and we'll all find it hard to imagine she ever edited the New Yorker.

The Daily Beast, the website overseen by Tina Brown and backed by Barry Diller, has launched. [The Daily Beast]

Dreamy Silver Fox Anderson Cooper may have a new boyfriend. Village Voice gossip Michael Musto is doing some whispering about a strapping young lad named Jonathan Chase who may or may not be canoodling with the esteemed CNN anchor. Cute! We care not because we're pointing fingers at a gay person, but because it's as newsworthy (or, at least, gossipworthy) as who Kate Hudson or Leonardo DiCaprio is dating. We're, um, orientation blind. After the jump, we've provided a small listicle (because why the hell not) detailing some of the Coop's previous romantic dalliances.

At an oh-so-pink party in Times Square yesterday — one stuffed with enough cupcakes to Google's Marissa Mayer proud — IAC launched a virtual world for girls aged 6 to 12, calling it Zwinky Cuties. Barry Diller presided and I captured the bizarre affair in video.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.

So what does Barry Diller have to say about the meltdown on Wall Street? "I think it's great, I think it should happen every day," he told a reporter from the Observer at a party for Graydon Carter's new book on Monday night, before adding that he was just joking. Fran Lebowitz's take: "Just when you think how horrible New York has become in terms of things interfering with the tone of the city, they're finally leaving!" she said. Who is "they" exactly? "The rich people! They're leaving!" Careful, Fran. If all the rich people leave town, you'll have no one to pick up your tab at the Waverly Inn every night. [NYO]

Would you let your DNA end up on a database controlled by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who has financial backing from Rupert Murdoch's wife Wendi Deng and Harvey Weinstein? The glam crowd at a Fashion Week "spit party" thrown by 23andme.com—which offers testing to reveal ancestry, genetic traits and propensity to diseases—had no qualms, perhaps confident of their genetic superiority: Ivanka Trump, for instance, was delighted to discover she didn't have fat genes (unlike one of her less fortunate friends).

Sure, you knew Anderson Cooper was the adorable unicorn of TV news anchors, but did you know he is so incredibly magical he can roll his tongue into a "really complicated four-leaf clover?" He can! Tongue-rolling is a genetic trait, but one can't help wonder if Cooper has had some practice. He apparently shows his skills only to certain, uh, special friends, like fellow closeted media personality Barry Diller, who, no joke, compared tongue technique with Cooper at a special retreat in Idaho. Some Google people were there, and the next thing you know, the tonguing had resulted in a big genetic-testing soiree in New York! Here's what Ivanka Trump and Rupert Murdoch said about their DNA at the party:

Tina Brown's image as a media power player remains anchored in the 1980s and the 1990s, when she edited Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She's attempting to change that with an internet venture, the Daily Beast, funded by InterActive Corp. chairman Barry Diller. But an early blunder getting Beast off the ground has left Brown red-faced and more shackled to her past than ever. It seems Brown's big idea for launching her website was — stop us if you've heard this one before — to publish a big list of the most powerful people in Hollywood. "The idea is so 1980s," one source told Nikki Finke. Apparently no one is even bothering to call Brown's staff back as they attempt to report the feature:

At the Diane von Fürstenberg show at New York's Fashion Week, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and his 23andMe cofounder wife Anne Wojcicki were spotted front and center. Which is hilarious, since Brin is rarely seen in anything but a t-shirt and jeans — hopefully he wore more stylish footwear than Crocs. Here he's spotted in the usual ensemble with Barry Diller, CEO of IAC, who had the sense to wear actual fashion. Friday's winner was hmann with "No, it's $40 for one song. You have to buy your own drinks, and there's no touching." (Photo by Getty/Michael Tran)

• Drama abounded at DKNY's show yesterday: PETA protestors burst onto the runway, shouting and brandishing placards—to the apparent amusement of André Leon Talley—while Petra Nemcova's new bangs rendered her unrecognizable and therefore unmolested by the media. Meanwhile the rather random celebrity trio of Winona Ryder, Christina Ricci, and Nicole Richie were regaled with "combinations of electric blue and black, neon pink and yellow anorak dresses, parachute pants and color-blocked knits" and a finale led by Donna Karan's five-year-old granddaughter Stefania. [The Cut, Fashionologie, NYDN, Telegraph]
  
  

Vanity Fair's perplexing list of the "New Establishment," that collection of people who aren't remotely "new" but certainly represent the establishment, is now online! The usual suspects (and Graydon Carter pals) continue to dominate (Barry Diller, Ron Perelman, Steven Spielberg), but there have been a few changes, too. The love affair with private equity moguls and hedge fund titans has clearly subsided: Both Eddie Lampert and Steve Schwarzman have been booted from the list, Henry Kravis went from 51 to 77, and SAC Capital founder Steve Cohen fell from 45th place to next-to-last on the list. And Harvey Weinstein's inability to generate hits at the box office has resulted in a precipitous fall from 41 to 87, which will undoubtedly make for an uncomfortable moment the next time Graydon bumps into Harvey at the Waverly Inn.

Following the shutdown of Muxtape, a site for posting online mixtapes, in a dispute with the music industry, someone has launched Opentape.fm, where you can download code to easily create your own Muxtape-like online mixtapes of MP3 files. And if the creators of Muxtape aren't directly responsible, they probably fed Opentape's developers everything they would need. The first clue is that the site is powered by the favored online publishing platform of millennial hipsters, Tumblr. Another clue is that the domain registration information points to 152 W. 57th Street in Manhattan, which just happens to be IAC CEO Barry Diller's address (Justin Ouellette, Muxtape's founder, worked at IAC site Vimeo). Then there are two small hints in the code: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.

• Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is expanding the probe into auction-rate financing. [Reuters]

V1 Jets, the company that offers trips to the Hamptons aboard a sea plane (for $495 each way) is the preferred method of transport for Adriana Lima, Petra Nemcova, Pierce Brosnan, Jeremy Piven, and Barry Diller. Or so says Jared Paul Stern at Luxist. [V1 Jets, Luxist]

Dan Rather's contract with Mark Cuban's TV network HDNet should not be up until nearly a year from now, assuming the terms Rather disclosed just before he inked the deal still hold. But would the contract prevent the former CBS Evening News anchor from contributing in some way to Tina Brown's forthcoming news website The Beast? Perhaps that's what Brown and Rather were discussing during a "very long lunch" at The Park on Tenth Avenue, as reported by a Post spy. Though Rather's work at HDNet has garnered some positive recognition, it's not nearly as visible as his work for CBS was. A Web gig or partnership would give Rather a shot at regaining more of the attention he once had — and that any veteran TV newsman would crave. Perhaps the skilled lawyers working for Brown's business partner Barry Diller can work something out on the proud old newshound's behalf. [Post]

You know how you are always saying to yourself "What the world needs now is a website… that would devote itself to chronicling the entertainment industry"? Well, another half million venture capital dollars has found a home trying to do that under the great helmsladyship of ex-New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman. So now it's a trend, this "internet as representing some sort of future for the media" thing! Because Tina Brown told us last week her plans for internet moguldum involve a new website called the Daily Beast, and Bonnie Fuller confirmed she was starting her own new website a few weeks before that, and while Waxman is not, like the two other media divas, internet retarded — she has a blog! — she is a lady, and as with the other two we hope her venture, The Wrap LLC fails because we're sick of having new sites we're supposed to check on the internet.

• New details about Tina Brown's forthcoming (and Barry Diller-funded) news site: It's going to be called The Daily Beast in an homage the Evelyn Waugh novel, Scoop. [Baltimore Sun, via Gawker]

Tina Brown has worked in the US for more than two decades, since taking the helm of Vanity Fair in 1984; and she's now attempting to reinvent herself for the internet. But Lady Evans, as the 55-year-old former magazine editor is also entitled to call herself, remains at heart a Brit of an earlier generation, pickled in ink and arch wit. Her forthcoming news site, backed by old patron Barry Diller of IAC, is to be dubbed The Daily Beast, after the shameless tabloid of Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel Scoop. The Digg kiddies will be so confused.

In the second quarter, IAC swung from a $94.6 million profit last year to a $421.6 million loss this year. Don't blame Jakob Lodwick! His former company, Vimeo, is nowhere near the top of IAC/InterActiveCorp's expense report for the past quarter. The real problem at Barry Diller's Internet empire is Cornerstone Brands, a rollup of catalog companies undermined by weak consumer spending in home and apparel retail. Cornerstone's losses led to a $300 million writedown in goodwill in IAC's second quarter. In addition, the soft real estate market cut revenue for home financing site LendingTree nearly in half.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.

Just who are the city's biggest media titans supporting this November? Below, details on the campaign contributions of Jeff Bewkes, Dick Parsons, Barry Diller, Jann Wenner, Bob Wright, Mel Karmazin, Robert F.X. Sillerman, Ben Silverman, and a handful of others.