It did not start out too well for AOL CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong, with a poll on the screen showing most of the attendees in the ballroom at Fortune Brainstorm Tech voting that the Time Warner online unit was either out of juice or irrelevant.

Armstrong did not break any news in the interview with Fortune’s lively interviewer, David Kirkpatrick, relying more on projecting an I’m-in-charge-here attitude and saying confident things like “a challenge is also an opportunity.”

In general, Armstrong tried to be upbeat about the prospects for AOL, which has for too long been the Web’s sad sack of an Internet company.

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Here is the latest video from the fine folks at JibJab Media, whose online political satires were among the first viral ones on the Web.

Titled “He’s Barack Obama,” it premiered tonight in front of the President at the 65th Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C.

The two-minute Obama video is being launched in conjunction with JibJab’s Facebook Connect integration, so all comments on the video will run through Facebook’s platform.

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A few weeks ago, I dropped in on Hans Peter Brøndmo, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to talk about Plum, one of the many different kinds of social networks that are not Facebook.

Brøndmo is CEO and founder of Plum, which was founded several years ago, and is trying to make a business in the places big social networks ignore.

Sites like Plum are what many like to call microsocial networking, used by people or Web sites who want less the overwhelming experience that the large social networks have become and more an ability to create with a smaller group.

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Microsoft is searching for a major executive to run its world-wide online sales, said several sources close to the situation, even as talks with Yahoo about a deal to partner in its search and display advertising businesses continue.

“They need to find a way to make money in display,” said one source close to the situation. “Or, I guess, find a way to not lose quite so much.”

The software giant has been trying to build its online business for many years now, spending a lot of money and not getting very much traction.

Meanwhile, the talks Microsoft has been having with Yahoo about outsourcing its online display sales to the Internet giant, among other scenarios, continue.

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In the wake of the changes at Microsoft’s online division, a senior ad sales exec, Bill Shaughnessy, is set to leave his post, the company confirmed. The departure was first reported in Ad Age, which said Shaughnessy’s future plans were undetermined and, in fact, noted it was unclear why the longtime Microsoft staffer of 15 years was leaving. Here’s why: Consolidation.

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It used to be, many years ago, that longtime Silicon Valley tech exec Eric Schmidt could work up a very significant head of steam when talking about the thuggish monopolistic practices of Microsoft and its negative impact on the tech industry.

And, for the most part, Schmidt was dead right.

Thus, BoomTown is both gobsmacked and a bit in awe that Schmidt–now sitting atop at the high-tech pig pile as CEO of the powerful search giant, Google–can, with a straight face, make the argument that everyone is wrong to be nervous about its deal with Yahoo to serve some of its search ads, even though the pair make up more than 80 percent of the search market.

Still, at a press conference yesterday, Schmidt went on the offensive to defend the Yahoo deal, which is set to begin in a few weeks, in a most peculiar way.

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How much is AOL really worth?

Well, its own owner, Time Warner, has been trying to put a big, shiny $10 billion price tag on the much-beleaguered online unit for months now, as it dribbles out tiny leaks about its hot-and-cold-running acquisition talks with both Yahoo and Microsoft.

But after yesterday’s less-than-impressive results for AOL, which dragged down the crowing Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes could deservedly do over its “Dark Knight” and “Sex and the City” film successes, can it even hope to get that much?

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On one of my many trips to Los Angeles (what can I say? I like to hang where LoRo* hangs), I dropped in to see Nick Grouf of Spot Runner.

As many might know, Spot Runner is an online-offline ad agency play that has gotten big funding and even bigger hype of late.

Usually, BoomTown runs screaming from such Web 2.0 dandies, but there is definitely some there there at Spot Runner.

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One thing is absolutely true: It is Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and only Ballmer who knows for sure whom he is most interested in to take over the dicey job of head of the software giant’s long-suffering online services business.

But there is a movement afoot among its developers and other execs at Microsoft to push for Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who replaced Founder Bill Gates in the job just over two years ago.

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BoomTown was all busy trying to think of execs to replace Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, as pressure mounts on him to right the troubled Internet company.

But now, Yang’s position feels safer than ever and it’s his nemesis–Microsoft–that needs a new leader for its long-stumbling online services business.

Microsoft is already been cracking, according to sources, with a wish list of internal and external candidates that CEO Steve Ballmer is now considering.

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In what will be yet another new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group will announce this morning that it will buy the digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

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Valleywag got a hold of a sticker (see below) that Bebo employees are passing around in anticipation of the close of the purchase of the third-ranked social-networking site by AOL for $850 million in cash.
The motto: “I, for one, welcome our new AOL overlords.”
Why shouldn’t they? As BoomTown reported, every Bebo employee has had their [...]

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Pretty please, don’t miss this excellent story today in the New York Times by an old colleague of mine, John Schwartz, about amazing images of the human body that were compiled by University of Washington anatomy and dissection expert David L. Bassett and View-Master inventor William B. Gruber six decades ago.
Together, they created the 25-volume [...]

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I usually don’t have a lot of time to get through big, long thumbsuckers in magazines any more–what can I say? I can hardly keep up with my Twitter feed–but here are two worth a look.

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The Wall Street Journal gave a big hello to its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, who takes over Dow Jones (owner of this site) today, by publishing this tough piece also today on the disaster of News Corp.’s investment in Gemstar-TV Guide International.
It comes from breakingviews, an online financial commentary Web site that the news organization [...]

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