If CBS were to greenlight a TV series about life at a modern media giant, the director would find it hard to cast anyone but Quincy Smith as himself. Call it 60 Seconds, a version of the news show sped up for the Web. His $1.8 billion CNET buy is just the latest episode in the life of the fast-talking president of CBS Interactive. Smith is sui generis; the stereotype, which grates on him but fits, is that of a frenetic dealmaker. Last month, he said he was looking for "the next YouTube"; instead, he bought a company which, having been founded in 1992, is eight times older than the current incarnation of CBS. CBS handlers offered to have him speak to me; I accepted. In the middle of the mile-a-minute conversation-argument, I think we both wondered what we'd gotten ourselves into. A partial transcript — the most I was able to type out while trying to keep up with Smith's banter:

Why was a roomful of venture capitalists and lawyers clinking champagne glasses at Zibibbo in Palo Alto last week? The target of their fulsome praise was entrepreneur Anthony Soohoo, a former Yahoo executive. And the reason? He had managed to flip his website Dotspotter, yet another celebrity gossip site with thoroughly derivative social-networking features, to CBS for a quick $10 million. Dotspotter's short one-year lifepspan didn't scare off serial charmer Quincy Smith, the startup-mad head of CBS Interactive. Having bought financial videoblog Wallstrip and Web-based social music site Last.fm, we can only conclude that Smith's strategy is to buy a lot of startups, throw them against the wall, and see what sticks. Nice work, especially when CBS shareholders are footing the bill. And who's receiving the checks? One of Dotspotter's beneficiaries, we hear, is Facebook CFO Gideon Yu. Nice to have a backup plan in case all those social networks turn out to be a fad.