Jim Bankoff–the well-regarded former AOL exec who runs an online sports news network called SB Nation–has nabbed $7 million in funding from investors to grow the company, including Comcast Interactive Capital, said sources.

There was also a Securities and Exchange Commission document filed on the transaction today, under the name Sportsblogs Inc., which you can see here.

The SEC filing noted that the money invested was $7.95 million. But sources said that the nearly million-dollar difference is for giving cash to early employees and founders and will not be used to fund SB Nation.

People familiar with the situation said SB Nation’s post-investment valuation, after this second round, will be $30 million and also include previous investors, such as Accel Partners and Allen & Co.

Its first round–which also included several prominent angel investors, such as former AOL exec Ted Leonsis and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner–was $5 million.

SB Nation has used that investment to grow like gangbusters over the last year, especially since Bankoff arrived last fall as its chairman and CEO.

Depending on which survey service you reference, the site has between four and seven million unique visitors a month.

It has done distribution deals with Internet giants like Yahoo (YHOO) to goose that growth.

While it has been around since 2003, founded by DailyKos’s Markos Moulitsas and others, the Washington, D.C.-based start-up has been aiming more at the sweet spot of local sports pages, especially as newspapers have become weaker.

SB Nation also covers national sports, using a community network of blogs, analysis and news.

Comcast Interactive Capital, which is the venture arm of Comcast (CMCSA), will also get a board seat for David Zilberman.

Bankoff (pictured here) was a longtime AOL exec, ultimately in charge of programming and products there. He worked on such products as TMZ.com, Moviefone, MapQuest and Netscape, as well as its AIM and ICQ messaging offerings.

After he left the Time Warner (TWX) online unit, he became a senior adviser to Providence Equity Partners. Bankoff still has that role, but has been working full-time at SB Nation for a year.

Lloyd Braun–the former Hollywood super-programmer turned Yahoo entertainment czar turned Hollywood and online programmer–has signed a multimillion-dollar deal to make an original destination site for Microsoft’s MSN portal, aimed at aggregating celebrity, entertainment and pop culture news, according to several sources.

With the still-unnamed site, MSN plants its own Paris Hilton flag in a very crowded field, which has numerous competitors such as People.com, PerezHilton.com, AOL’s TMZ.com, PopSugar.com and Yahoo’s OMG.

It is also interesting that Microsoft (MSFT), which has focused its efforts of late on its technology, especially related to online advertising and search, is making another foray into the content arena via MSN, where it has had mixed results in the past.

Ironically, Braun (pictured here) was the exec who green-lighted the OMG site, which aggregates celebrity-oriented content and has since become a big traffic success for Yahoo (YHOO).

The deal, which will be announced tomorrow, will be a joint venture with Microsoft and BermanBraun Media–an independent multimedia production company headed by Braun and also former Hollywood studio exec Gail Berman.

Braun left Yahoo under a cloud, after clashing with his superiors who had brought him in to make new online programming, as he is doing now.

But that has not stopped Yahoo from making its own deal with Braun, sources said, a much smaller effort to produce a daily “Lunacy Report.” The deal has not yet been announced, although it has been signed.

That online project will be focused on “weird news,” which is an amazingly huge driver of page views on Yahoo’s news site–almost 7%–featuring stories like one today about a man who was jailed for faking his own death.

The video-heavy “Lunacy Report” will have Vance DeGeneres, who is the executive producer of the HardlyNews online parody site and also brother of Ellen DeGeneres, as its host.

But the MSN deal is a much larger one, requiring BermanBraun to staff up, and it already has many former Yahoo employees involved in the project, sources said.

That’s because, akin to a regular Hollywood production studio, BermanBraun will be building both the front and back end using Microsoft technology. Both BermanBraun and Microsoft will be selling ads for the site.

But it is Microsoft that will be footing much of the multimillion budget for the site–to launch in early 2009–and will own it outright. It will get support on the main MSN page and also throughout the service.

Advertisers briefed on the project said the site is aiming for higher integration of branding than just simple display ads, looking for innovative ways in which marketing messages are integrated into content.

And it will be designed to be much more interactive to spur more engagement. In fact, the new site does not look like a typical MSN site, said sources who have seen it, with a highly stylized design and a wide range of applications.

Braun was reportedly pitching advertisers last week in New York, who said he described it as focused on the wider pop culture scene and not just on celebrities, which is an area of much user interest online.

It is not clear if PepsiCo (PEP) will be a major advertiser yet. BermanBraun announced a deal last July with Pepsi to support original entertainment content developed for online platforms.

The entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant has a “first-look” at BermanBraun online projects and has a chance to fund and sponsor original online content it produces.

What will be most interesting will be what happens to the new MSN site and OMG, if Microsoft and Yahoo do manage to strike a merger deal at some point, despite a failure to do so thus far.

Yesterday, newly minted Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes (pictured here) finally acknowledged the Web equivalent of the grass is green and the sky is blue related to its AOL unit.

His move–separating the dying Internet-access business from its much more robust online ad business–was long in coming, and it has been perplexing as to why it took so long for the media giant to declare this publicly.

The bold tone is certainly nice to hear at Time Warner, which has been cautious in the Web game over the past few years, ever since it got snookered in the mega-deal merger to AOL at the peak of the last Internet bubble.

Once burned, twice shy, one might say. But, in the case of the AOL-Time Warner merger, it was scorched earth for the company and the recovery has been long and painful.

Since then, the AOL unit has chugged along slowly, with its parts glommed together in an increasingly uncomfortable way, a vestige of an era when AOL ruled the soup-to-nuts online services business. It was once a very lucrative arrangement, with fat monthly fees rolling in, along with an ad business based on 1999 bubble economics.

No longer, as the way people access the Web was separated from a now largely disintermediated Internet.

Thus, the logical move has been to split the parts apart, giving Time Warner and Bewkes more options, including selling off either or both.

That issue is sure to come into sharp relief with Microsoft’s recent $44.6 billion bid to buy Yahoo, which most are saying is a dire problem for Time Warner, given they both were the prime candidates to buy AOL’s assets.

Well, maybe, but maybe not.

AOL still has one of the stronger ad networks out there, because of its prescient purchase of Advertising.com in mid-2004 for about $435 million. While there are way too many ad networks out there now, it is still an under-leveraged asset within the company, which could be sold, but does not need to be. After all, Time Warner is in the ad business overall and owning an online network is not such a stretch for it.

Plus, it will now be freed from the yoke of the access business, which will eventually decline to almost nothing. But that does not mean zero and its millions of customers might be worth something to someone. In any case, Time Warner can milk that part of the business–as it has been doing–until it eventually falls over dead.

The most interesting part of Bewkes’s figuring will have to center around its content and portal property, as well several interesting Web efforts.

While it is not known for original content, for example, AOL’s recently redone finance page is really quite excellent and useful, giving a dominant site like Yahoo Finance a credible competitor.

In addition, AOL owns pieces of the also terrific TMZ.com celebrity news site, and cool services like its very-early-to-widgets Userplane and the well-done Truveo online video service.

How Time Warner handles these kind of assets, to my mind, will be the most interesting indication of what it intends its digital future to be.

(By the way, Bewkes will be interviewed on stage at our sixth D: All Things Digital conference in late May, so it will be interesting to hear what he has to say then about AOL and Time Warner’s digital strategy.)

The AOL-owned celebrity dishfest–which covers the antics of Britney Spears with as much intensity as if it were the crisis in Iraq–had a video post on him and his longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan, who are now apparently paparazzi-worthy.

The pair were coming out of a Los Angeles restaurant and a cameraman pretended to be from a show called “Cheaters,” which made Zuckerberg suddenly nervous, although he was still laughing.

And, before you could say Paris Hilton, he made a smooth escape into a waiting car like a celebrity pro, dignity intact.

A longer post is coming about my visit to TMZ.com, which is owned by Time Warner (and launched jointly by its Telepictures and AOL units) and is doing some of the most interesting blends of text, video and pictures on the Web right now and pointing the way to what kind of content offerings really work in the medium.

And, an added plus and a rarity: Hollywood execs who really get the Internet and are not scared of it. Why should they be, with 8 million unique visitors a month, despite being launched less than two years ago? And then there is that important buzz (thanks to the never-ending hijinks of Alec Baldwin, Michael Richards, Mel Gibson, Anna Nicole Smith and, of course, the gift that keeps on giving, Paris Hilton) that the site has garnered both online and, especially, offline.

Here’s a trio of video interviews I shot at TMZ.com, with more to come, with Levin, Alan Citron, its general manager (note the rogue’s gallery of celebs behind him) and former Telepictures exec Jim Paratore (who is still working with the site and on an upcoming TMZ television show as executive producer):

When I saw the numbers, part of its parent Time Warner’s first-quarter earnings announced Wednesday, it was hard not to remember the days when former AOL execs like Steve Case and Bob Pittman crowed constantly about the subscriber growth at AOL and repeated ad nauseam the most annoying but effective mantra: “So Easy to Use, No Wonder It’s No. 1!”

Somehow, “It’s No. 3!” just does not sound the same.

And who can forget the ubiquitous AOL disks that blanketed the world (even showing up in orders of flash-frozen Omaha Steaks), which was the single boldest and, well, nuttiest marketing scheme in Web history.

Now, I know AOL has been strategically shifting its business away from the access market to the ad-supported model for its various offerings, like email, services and content, that it started giving away for free and has added millions of free subscribers (many of whom used to pay).

And the quarterly results showed its strategy has been a good move (and all credit for that should go to former AOL head Jonathan Miller, who was shabbily forced out of AOL last year after working hard to improve the service under difficult and stressful pressures from Time Warner’s top brass). Ad revenue rose an impressive 40 percent from the previous year, even though overall revenue fell from the loss of the access fees that once paid for all those private executive planes in the old AOL.

AOL head Randy Falco was already touting AOL’s new resurgence a few weeks ago when the former NBC exec hosted major advertisers at the gleaming Time Warner Center in NYC to show off new interactive programming and features in an event he called a “coming-out party.” It was heavy on content and flashy tie-ins with television shows and movies, such as a renewed deal with reality-show kingpin Mark Burnett. From all signs, such fare will be heavier still in the year ahead, with an overdose of razzle-dazzle marketing noise.

I can’t say I don’t kind of like the ideas. Burnett’s combo trivia/treasure-hunt game, “Gold Rush,” was fun, and “Ye Olde Shrek the Third Royal Tournament” (games based on the new movies) will probably keep the kids happy. And, on a pure hokey scale, another show based on checking the serial numbers on your cash to win a million dollars (”Million Dollar Bill”) and one that lets users pick and control a real-life group of “Gilligan’s Island” contestants (”iLand”) scores off the charts.

This butts-in-the-seats approach is no surprise from Falco, whose career is steeped with television experience that focuses on churning out the hits and big audiences for content. And yet, while its ad-sales team, under longtime AOLer Michael Kelly (how he hung on from the past regime makes him my first choice for “iLand”), deserves kudos, one wonders how AOL can keep those hits coming. First, there is a lot out there on the Net to see, and it is ever easier to find it.

And, more important, it is hard to create a true and lasting Internet hit, rather than just a series of what are probably expensive traffic spikes. It is no coincidence that there has never really been one.

Falco might ask Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis, another lifer within AOL and really its old heart and soul. Over the course of his long and colorful career, he has tried mightily to make a Net entertainment hit–he even made a very early deal with the late, legendary NBC programmer Brandon Tartikoff–and encountered a lot of near-misses and flat-out failures more than successes. Not that the ebullient Leonsis was ever defeated by this, and I think is still at it.

AOL has managed to garner one great hit, TMZ.com, the now-popular gossip site–thanks to the troubled hijinks of Britney Spears, Alec Baldwin, Lindsay Lohan and Mel Gibson–that it launched with Telepictures Productions in late 2005 (and credit for that goes to another ex-AOLer, Jim Bankoff, who was also badly treated).

I chronicled a lot of these dashed and pricey efforts to create big entertainment offerings in two books I wrote about AOL in the 1990s, called “aol.com” (about the rise of AOL) and “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere” (about the fall of the company after its ill-fated merger with Time Warner; cover shamelessly pictured here).

The latter title was from a story about a boy digging in a giant pile of manure, and that was his response when asked why, which was also an internal AOL mantra during the company’s many ups and downs. And today, it could also be what current execs might use to explain their quest to create a Web hit.

The fact of the matter is that the true hits of AOL have always been its easy-to-use services, such as AIM, email and Buddy Lists. I am hearing a lot from folks in these areas that Falco’s concentration on hit-making is troubling and takes focus away from AOL’s core strengths of making the Internet navigable and simple for the vast majority of users.

I would agree. And more on this disgruntlement inside AOL very soon.