Diller’s Plans For Web Integration; UK Travel Acquisition On Cards; News Aggregation Site

Updated below:
Barry Diller is on somewhat of a PR offensive for the last week or so, with stories cropping up in various media circles about his company’s future online expansion plans. The joint venture Comedy destination site with Huffington Post is about to launch soon, and some other new ventures are coming. Also, as this Newsweek story says, IAC is looking to integrate its disparate online properties better, and later this fall, information, reviews and e-commerce opportunities from IAC sites like Citysearch, Ticketmaster and Evite will begin appearing directly in the search results of Ask.com users. The story also mentions that Diller says he’s looking at one new company right now, for an acquisition.
In the Guardian, he explained the integration: the integrated version is dubbed Ask10. Also, Michael Jackson, the former Channel 4 boss who presides over programming at IAC, is not leaving, or at least Diller says so…Jackson has been linked with the vacant post for the top job at ITV but Diller says he “just can’t leave … I think he’s much more interested in this.”
In another Guardian story, Diller mentioned: “We are looking at several things in the UK. We are definitely looking in the travel space. There’s lots of little entrepreneurship that intrigues us.” One potential target could be Cheapflights, the price comparison website which has confirmed it is considering a £200m sale or flotation, the story says.
Updated: NYTimes has another story on Diller’s plans: as the story explains, Diller is investing in and starting smaller targeted content sites built around humor, news and popular culture that remind him of the early efforts in cable TV programming. Diller said he expected Jackson to carry out perhaps dozens of such ventures during the next few years. “The amount of capital we’l put in this over time will be hundreds of millions of dollars…This is a wonderful area right now to invest in.”
Also, Jackson said that his next area of focus might be news — a site that aggregates and edits news and helps point people to the best information available — but he was not ready to talk about specifics. Digg anyone?

Comments have been disabled for this post