Drippy Manhattan evenings aren’t usually a draw for an outdoor cocktail party but the FoundersClub NYC Internet Week soiree had something that overcomes a little rain: power. Barry Diller, the chairman and CEO of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), was hosting two of the hottest not-so-new guys in town—AOL’s Tim Armstrong and News Corp.‘s Jon Miller—in the Rooftop Garden at Rockefeller Center and the draw was irresistible for Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendy, Jeff Zucker, Sir Martin Sorrell and more from media, advertising and tech.

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Jeff Zucker, head of NBC Universal, was famously quoted earlier this year warning that the media industry had to work so “that we do not end up trading analog dollars for digital pennies.” It’s a great line and an even better observation. But I think it’s inevitable and it’s going to happen no matter how hard they try to avoid it. Analog and digital, it turns out, are polar opposites. Analog has physical costs which lead to scarcity-driven business models. Digital has zero marginal cost (or near zero), which leads to ubiquity-driven business models.

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Michael Phelps who? In what is probably the greatest moment in this Olympics, Usain Bolt of Jamaica won gold in the 100-meter dash in 9.69 seconds, a new world record–and he didn’t even have to try after the first half of the race. But you wouldn’t know it if you were here in the U.S.–well, if you were not online actively searching for a video clip of it. NBCOlympics.com has a lame text story online, with a lamer Getty Images-supplied photo slideshow. Not that we were expecting anything different from NBC today, but it does add up to the growing frustration with the “bottled-up” (not my phrase … Jeff Zucker used it in a CNBC interview yesterday) coverage by the network.

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