Time Inc.’s Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey that it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8, along with a lot of other tech-savvy women in Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

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When Time Warner reports its second -quarter earnings tomorrow morning, before the markets open, most Wall Street analysts are not expecting much from the media giant, as it continues to slog toward a rejiggering of itself.

Time Warner–which owns assets like the Warner Bros. movie studio, the AOL online unit, the HBO and Turner cable networks and Time Inc. magazines–is expected to earn 37 cents per share, compared to 72 cents a year ago, according to a poll of analysts from Thomson Reuters.

Revenue is expected to be $6.97 billion, down from $11.56 billion in the same quarter last year. This drop is mostly due to the March spinoff of its cable unit, Time Warner Cable.

But AOL and its magazine unit are expected to continue to drag on Time Warner’s financial performance.

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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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More moving of the chairs at AOL’s Platform-A.

The Time Warner online unit will announce today that Mark Ellis has been promoted to EVP of sales at the advertising division.

He will lead Platform-A’s digital ad sales, sources said, including premium efforts at AOL’s MediaGlow content unit and for its third-party ad network.

It is all part of extensive management reorganization being done by Platform-A President Greg Coleman, as new CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong started yesterday in his new job of reviving AOL.

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Here’s a joke an exec at AOL recently sent me: Q: How many Yahoo and AOL dealmakers does it take to screw in a lightbulb A: None–you don’t need light if you’re never going to sign a merger agreement. Ahahahaha. Ha. Well, not really. So, seriously, what is Time Warner going to do about its AOL online unit?

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Time Inc., the largest magazine company in the world, is laying off hundreds and reorganizing itself drastically, due to tough economic conditions, especially in advertising, as well as the more inexorable diminishing of its business as readers move to the Web.

Time Inc. Chairman and CEO Ann Moore penned the email memo to employees tonight. She tried to tout gains in its digital business–part of the reason for the reorg is to move more of its content to Web platforms–noting 26 million people visit its Time Inc. sites monthly. Not good enough it seems.

Here’s the memo.

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Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices at the Time Warner Center in New York yesterday with news of the sale of DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.

Why?

Maybe because that tasty payment is going right into the hands of Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, which bought the fashion and shopping newsletter business for $3 million in 2003.

This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman–nicknamed “Pitchman” for his smooth business stylings–was driven out of then-AOL Time Warner on the proverbial rail.

If you want a taste of those once-grim times for Pittman, here is an excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future.”

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Ann Moore says Time Inc. really does get the Internet.
It is not as if the magazine giant has had a lot of choice in that matter, but the CEO of Time Inc. seems to embrace the inevitable with resolve and even excitement–which is rare in old-media circles still–in this interview.
By way of background, D: All [...]

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The Wall Street Journal has a special “D: All Things Digital” tab today, with excerpts from several of the interviews that took place onstage a few weeks ago at our fifth conference. I did a video for it, embedded below.
The interviews featured are with famed filmmaker George Lucas, CBS CEO Les Moonves, Time Inc. CEO [...]

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Why have a blog, I say, if you can’t write about people you actually like in it every now and then. And also make grainy videos (see below after the jump).

First, the news that Owen Thomas, who writes the most excellent blog Beta for Business 2.0 magazine’s Web site, where he has worked in a [...]

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While it did not get a lot of play last week when Time Warner COO Jeffrey Bewkes dangled the idea of a stock offering for its AOL unit, the suggestion made my head hurt all over again thinking about the myriad opportunities that the online unit had missed over the last few years being held [...]

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We’re all in Carlsbad, Calif., now, getting ready for our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, which will begin tomorrow night.
So here’s one of my movies to show you how we prepare for the annual conference, which is highlighted this year by a joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, the twin [...]

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