Now, BoomTown likes a good jingle as much as anyone else, but this new one from Microsoft’s Bing search service is sticking in my head like a piece of chewed gum.

Shot at Keith Valley Middle School in Horsham, Pa., it uses 400 very adorable sixth graders, who are dragooned into one very large “Bing Goes the Internet” dance–complete with logo wear. The kids rock, the advertising jingle not so much.

They are using the winning entry in the Bing jingle contest, by Jonathan Mann.

I must say, regretfully, stick with vampires, Microsoft (MSFT).

In any case, here’s the video, as well as one of the super-duper, migraine-inducing “I Do! I Do!” television commercials from Ask.com–a unit of InterActiveCorp (IACI)–below it:

In yet another appointment of an exec close to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, Patch Media CEO Jon Brod (pictured here) has taken over the new venture arm of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit.

AOL confirmed the appointment to BoomTown.

Patch is a hyperlocal community news site, in which Armstrong was the major investor. It was bought by AOL in June for just under $10 million.

Like recently installed AOL advertising head Jeff Levick, who worked with Armstrong at Google (GOOG), Brod has also known him for a long time.

He ran Patch for Armstrong and was president and COO of Polar Capital Group, Armstrong’s private investment company, which is focused on the media, technology and sports sectors.

Previous to that, Brod worked as an exec at InterActiveCorp (IACI) and even at the National Basketball Association.

Now Brod will helm AOL Ventures, a new unit of AOL that Armstrong created as part of a larger new strategy to invest in new things, and he will manage a portfolio of some of its more difficult recent acquisitions.

That means Brod will be figuring out what to do with AOL’s pricey purchase of its Bebo social networking site, as well as the Truveo video search unit, widgetmaker Userplane.

Sources close to the situation said AOL is bullish on Truveo (even though the previous management at AOL was poised to sell it), thinks Userplane’s once-promising prospects have dwindled due to neglect and will likely seek to sell Bebo.

But Brod will also be charged with investing in start-ups and also incubating.

“The Ventures group is about fostering innovation around the globe,” said Brod, in an interview with me. “And we’re going to create the Internet’s most entrpreneurial-friendly environment in order to accomplish this.”

The New York-based Patch is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.

Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

It’s been a real winning streak since then for D, due in large part to our great speakers–such as Microsoft (MSFT) icon Bill Gates and Apple (AAPL) legend Steve Jobs.

Both have been onstage many times over the years, including a historic interview the pair of tech titans did together in 2007 at D5.

Other amazing speakers have included: Howard Stringer of Sony (SNE), Barry Diller of InterActiveCorp (IACI), legendary director George Lucas, Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon (AMZN), former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman, News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft head Steve Ballmer, Walt Disney (DIS) honcho Bob Iger, Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard (ATVI), CBS (CBS) CEO Les Moonves, Democratic and Republican pols like former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John McCain, all the leadership of Google (GOOG) and many, many more.

We have had a lot of great moments onstage with all these tech and media players over the years, to be sure, with interviews ranging from the funny to the sublime to the truly disastrous.

But, like the digital industry and the innovation our conference focuses on, we also like to lean forward to try to figure out what the Next Big Thing is around the corner, whether it comes from Silicon Valley or not.

That’s why we’re kicking off our conference on May 26 with two of the founders of Twitter–Biz Stone and Evan Williams–who are riding high on tech’s latest hot thing, which might turn out to be either a rocket ship or a shooting star.

They’ll be followed up over the next two days by a plethora of interesting players, from the leaders of several major mobile companies to content execs hit hard by fast-moving digital forces to a new Internet leader like Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz, who is trying to turn around one of the Web’s great icons from its more recent lackluster path.

And, as we always do, we will be featuring a spate of demos too, trying to see if we can unearth that next next thing.

In the past, the D stage has seen the debut of start-up products like Sling Media’s Slingbox, Aliph’s Jawbone and Pure Digital’s Flip, all of which have gone onto glory. And also some, like Palm’s Foleo, which did not.

While not everyone can attend D, our crack staff is committed to bringing all the action from this year’s conference to readers of the All Things Digital site via up-to-the-minute blogs, photos, videos, tweets, digs and more. We’ll also, as soon as we can, post the videos of each of the onstage sessions, in their entirety.

Until it all kicks off, here is the list of speakers, below, in alphabetical order, who will be appearing at 2009’s D7 conference:

Irving Azoff | CEO of Ticketmaster Entertainment (TKTM)

Mitchell Baker | Chairman of Mozilla

Steve Ballmer | CEO of Microsoft

Carol Bartz | CEO of Yahoo

Mark Cuban | Chairman of HDNet and Owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Landmark Theaters and Magnolia Pictures

Eve Ensler | Playwright and Founder of V-Day

Arianna Huffington | Editor-in-Chief of the Huffington Post

Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo | CEO of Nokia (NOK)

Mike Lazaridis | Co-CEO of Research In Motion (RIMM)

John Lilly | CEO of Mozilla

John Malone | Chairman of Liberty Media Corporation (LCAPA)

Roger McNamee | Partner, Elevation Partners

Jon Miller | Chief Digital Officer of News Corp.

Jon Rubinstein | Executive Chairman, Palm (PALM)

Randall Stephenson | CEO of AT&T (T)

Biz Stone | Co-founder of Twitter

Owen Van Natta | CEO of MySpace

Katharine Weymouth | Publisher of the Washington Post (WPO)

Evan Williams | Co-founder and CEO of Twitter

Jeff Zucker | CEO of NBC Universal (GE)

Don’t miss this very good interview–does he ever give a bad one?–that IAC’s Barry Diller did with The Wall Street Journal’s Shira Ovide in today’s edition.

After a bruising court battle with shareholder and cable mogul John Malone of Liberty Media (LINTA), Diller finally broke apart the Internet conglomerate six weeks ago. His reason: IAC (IACI) had become too complex and its stock had suffered due to the operating confusion.

Here are BoomTown’s three favorite Diller killer quotes from The Journal interview …

On the breakup:

“I don’t have answers for anybody else. What I know is that internal complexity makes for superficiality. There’s never essentially a pure story unless there’s a pure product line that has its own shining clarity.”

On Internet advertising:

“You really want to get a headache? Try to understand Internet advertising. Social-networking advertising is being discounted because there is so much inventory [of available ad spots], and because methods have not yet been found to make it very effective. Will that get figured out? I absolutely believe it will. What form will it take? Absolutely unknown.”

On his fight with Malone:

“It is water down the drain. It’s unfortunate that executives of Liberty forced us into this process that resulted in the court affirming our position, but they did. It was hurtful to the company in which they’re investors, it was hurtful to me, it was a waste of time and money. It’s over. It certainly has no effect because my relations with John Malone are right and proper. They can have board members, but I outvote them.”

And, if you want more Diller unplugged, about all of the above and more, here is the highlight reel from my interview with him in May at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference.

Don’t miss his take on Hollywood children’s teeth.

The entire interview will go up next week in this blog, but here is the shorter video for now:

Lanzone had been at the company, which is owned by Barry Diller’s InteractiveCorp (IACI), for more than a half-dozen years, before stepping down in January in a management reshuffle at the company that put Match.com CEO Jim Safka at the top of Ask.

At the time, Diller praised Lanzone copiously in a statement, but noted that “these changes are intended to strengthen and streamline the operating structure at IAC, both leading up to our intended spinoffs, and beyond.”

For those not following IAC’s tribulations of late, Diller is currently embroiled in a vitriolic fight over control of the company with one of its biggest shareholders, Liberty Media, and its voluble leader John Malone.

That’s no longer Lanzone’s problem, although he remains a consultant to Ask for a little while longer and is also an entrepreneur-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures. He told BoomTown that he is still trying to figure out what to do next, but wants to remain on the product side of the consumer Internet business.

I like Lanzone a lot, especially given the more innovative and even aggressive efforts Ask has made to gain ground and try to put a dent in Google’s market share in recent years, laudable efforts a larger player like Yahoo might have been trying as hard.

While we despised the high-concept Kato Kaelin ads (see it once again posted below the Lanzone video to see why) Ask used this summer, BoomTown does not blame Lanzone for them–paging Barry Diller! All is forgiven anyway, since they were junked.

In any case, here is a video interview with Lanzone done yesterday, in which we talked about where search was headed:

“I am beginning to think these people are insane. … Everything they cite is hogwash.”

That’s what is known as a classic Barry Diller, who can be relied on to come out with a good one when provoked.

In this case, the provocateur is Liberty Media’s John Malone (pictured on the right in this comic with Diller), whose company has headed to court to try to remove Diller from his job as chairman and CEO of IAC/InterActiveCorp.

As chronicled by the always deft Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal today, the fight between the longtime partners is getting uglier still with–oh, let’s just admit it–totally confusing moves and countermoves about the fate of IAC and its subsidiaries.

Liberty has a giant stake in all of these entities and Diller, of course, has control of that stake. A recipe for mogul mud wrestling, if ever there was one.

But the fight is a serious one for a number of high-profile Web companies within IAC, which was being restructured to stop just this kind of fighting between Diller and Malone.

Just how Diller has gone about rejiggering it all, in complicated spin-offs in a way that allegedly undercuts Liberty’s control yet again, is what set the new round of tensions off.

Those sites embroiled in the fighting include: Expedia, TicketMaster, LendingTree and Ask.

As luck would have it, Diller will be interviewed onstage at the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital in late May, so there will be plenty to talk about!

The last time I interviewed him at the Monaco Media Forum last November, Diller let loose too, when he memorably scoffed at the $15 billion valuation for Facebook and Microsoft’s $240 million investment in the hot social network.

“If it was real money, it would be insane, but since it isn’t really, then why bother [worrying about it],” said Diller. “It doesn’t mean anything, it is a phantom, false valuation. Let them sell for $14 billion, $998 million, and then I’ll believe them.”

Here is a sampling of quotes from my one-on-one interview with him onstage at the Monaco Media Forum on Friday morning, taken from the not-so-audible audio of my Flip video camera. But you’ll get the idea of why Diller (pictured here) remains one of the more robust characters out there.

We began talking about the split of IAC into five parts, lopping off unrelated businesses, with the backdrop of a struggle he has been engaged in with Liberty Media’s John Malone.

Why do it? “We were being superficial managers,” said Diller. For example, of the mortgage business around LendingTree, he said: “I have little to no interest and that is not how I want to live my life.”

(Very few execs, I can assure you, will admit to rank corporate boredom about their businesses.)

But Diller was just getting started, taking shots at everything from the “dumb” Hollywood writers’ strike to the insanity of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation, as well as his own corporate shortcomings.

About the idea of synergy among his many properties, which he once touted effusively: “I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law. They have to naturally fit into each other. The problem is that there was so much huffing and puffing to fit them together.”

(Again, it’s nice to hear someone admit when things just don’t work.)

Diller also took aim at Google, within a week of signing a big guaranteed ad deal with it for IAC’s Ask search network. “It has huge market share, and I don’t believe in the long run it will be able to keep up with it,” he said.

(In this, he is dead right, and the lack of search innovation at Google is troubling.)

While letting Yahoo off the hook for its management woes, Diller did marvel at Microsoft’s inability to compete in the online business. “Microsoft is a greater failure really, if you think about it, with a huge amount of capital and no real traction,” he said.

Diller also noted that the writers’ strike in Hollywood was silly, noting that the writers were striking over virtually nothing. “No one can solve an issue where there is no economic model yet,” he said. “Over the next five years, the market will develop, and at the end of that period, if the economic value is being created, [the studios] will sit in good faith and give [the writers] the money.”

(I am not so sure the writers should trust a bunch of execs who have shafted them so many times when it relates to technology, although Diller is correct that there are no real revenues to speak of yet.)

Lastly, he scoffed at the recent $15 billion valuation for Facebook and Microsoft’s $240 million investment in the hot social network, noting it was simply a move to thwart Google by the software giant.

“If it was real money, it would be insane, but since it isn’t really, then why bother [worrying about it],” said Diller. “It doesn’t mean anything, it is a phantom, false valuation. Let them sell for $14 billion, $998 million, and then I’ll believe them.”

Me too.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.