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

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.

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.

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New MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta starts his first day on the job at MySpace bright and early this morning, coming to its Beverly Hills HQ as he takes over for co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe.

Along with him will also be a new COO, former AOL exec Mike Jones, whose appointment will be announced this morning, sources said.

Jones was the founder of Userplane, a social-networking application maker that was bought by then-AOL head Jon Miller in 2006. Miller is now the digital chief at News Corp., which owns MySpace.

With a strong product and technology background, Jones is an excellent choice to be a partner to Van Natta–who was hired by Miller last week in a flurry of change at the social-networking site.

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Microsoft does not have a secret plot to buy Yahoo.

Maybe Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer should be hovering in the wings, like a digital Simon Legree ready to pounce again on poor Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

But he’s not.

And still the hopeful, the suspicious and, most of all, the beaten down Yahoo shareholders continue to jump on any utterance from the software giant, even woefully mistranslating interviews with its top execs, to make it so.

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Here’s a video I did from a cool party I went to Tuesday night in Santa Monica, Calif., at the offices of ad network optimizer, Rubicon Project.
Organized by Beta South, a networking organization for digital start-ups in the Los Angeles area, it’s an interesting contrast to the frenetic nature of comparable Silicon Valley parties.
In [...]

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Everybody remain calm.

While it might have looked like it was the rapture for major Internet players yesterday–what with everyone and his mother getting sucked up into the Yahoo-Microsoft takeover tussle and disappearing into the ether of confusion that now reigns over the situation–it is best to keep moving toward the light of harsh reality for illumination.

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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 [...]

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As expected, from a story we broke in BoomTown more than a week ago, AOL confirmed it has bought the Israeli content-targeting ad network Quigo.
The sale price, said sources, was a lofty $300 million, around what Yahoo paid for data analytics ad network BlueLithium in September.
Well, it’s probably a good thing for AOL as it [...]

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I will be traveling south to Los Angeles Sunday afternoon to do a few days reporting there.
That will include visits to the offices of JibJab, Userplane, Disney’s Internet Group, as well as some catching up with newly minted investor Ross Levinsohn and Joost CEO Mike Volpi.
We’ll be headed that way again a week later to [...]

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