Tony Conrad, CEO and co-founder of Sphere–the contextually relevant content engine AOL bought in the spring of 2008 for upward of $25 million–left the Time Warner online unit last month, several sources have told BoomTown in recent weeks.

But, in an effort by AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, Conrad has agreed to become “Special Advisor” to its AOL Ventures Unit.

Apparently, he is also mulling a new start-up and remains a VC too.

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Project Granola?

Apparently, that’s the jokey nickname that’s been given by some in the company to Microsoft’s new online strategy, in the wake of its failed efforts to acquire Yahoo that ended in a big heap of mess this past weekend.

Now, sources tell BoomTown, it is all about “organic”–hence the image of a healthy handful of granola (except for the fact that, in my experience, nobody really likes granola after eating it as much as they think will before).

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AOL is turning into the Oprah Winfrey of the digital world, it seems, opening up Time Warner’s (TWX) checkbook to as many start-ups as it can.

Last month, it was $850 million in cash for social-networking site Bebo.
And, today, it’s a much smaller slug for Sphere, which started as a blog search engine and morphed into [...]

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Now, we’re cooking with some gas over at Yahoo, closing in on the two-thirds point of Jerry Yang’s declared 100-day March to Happiness.

Today, the Internet giant will announce the purchase of a clever Web site called BuzzTracker, which uses a combination of editorial selection and complex algorithms to aggregate content from all over the Web, [...]

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I motored on out to Stinson Beach, the lovely coastal community about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, yesterday for the annual get-together thrown by True Ventures, a venture firm.

I missed the clambake part of the event–my kids need tending, so I can’t be all Elvis-acting!–but had a nice time chatting with its partners [...]

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I went down to visit the offices of Sphere on Monday to see new developments at the blog search engine.

Full disclosure, although it is right in front of you throughout this site: AllThingsD.com uses the Sphere widget to point readers to more related articles and blogs based in authority and other algorithmic criteria within the [...]

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