Late Friday afternoon, Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) Senior Editor Milton Coleman sent a memo to the staff with a social media policy–effectively immediately–aimed at staffers’ use of “”ndividual accounts on online social networks, when used for reporting and for personal use.”

The new policy was translated externally by WaPo ombudsman Andy Alexander on his blog, along with a worst-case illustration: the decision by Managing Editor Raju Narisetti, responsible for features and the web, to shut down what appears to have been a small Twitter account intended for a private audience of friends and associates (as private as something that goes to 90-ish people can be) after some of his comments were called into question. Most of the online conversation that ensued was among people who had not yet seen the guidelines, which the paper, in a major transparency failure, didn’t make public.

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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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Sitting in a McDonald’s in suburban St. Louis, breaking my rule about eating fast food when I’m not on the road and trying out the latest Zune gimmick–free wireless access via Wayport at roughly 9,800 golden arch outlets across the U.S. First impressions: Way easy and way slow. It’s not just the Zune Wi-Fi that’s sluggish; the free-with-food hour of Wayport Wi-Fi on my laptop is slower than real ketchup. It took about five minutes to establish a connection, load the page and log on. You could finish a Happy Meal by the time you’re actually doing anything purposeful.

As for the Zune, as soon as I went to the Marketplace area on my freshly updated second-gen 8G model, it started looking for the network.

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I wrote some long stories for the Sports Business Journal, but nothing comes close to John Ourand’s magnum opus on ESPN in this week’s issue. Ourand, who worked on the report for three months, takes a deep look at the sharp-as-a-pistol folks from Bristol–and the way they are viewed by advertisers, media buyers, leagues and competitors.

The story keys off a well-traveled PowerPoint presentation called “The Emperor’s New Clothes: How ESPN’s Multi-Platform Strategy Hasn’t Improved Ratings” that claims moving to ESPN doesn’t help sports raise ratings in comparison to broadcast nets and that its vaunted multi-platform strategy doesn’t add much overall. Basically, as Ourand says, the idea is to bash everything about ESPN, which has been a lightning rod for criticism for much of its existence.

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Unless you’re an employee of IAC, you’re probably reading this here first. … We’ve obtained an emailed memo from IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller to his staff that went out around midnight Eastern as he prepares to fight John Malone’s Liberty Media in a Delaware court for control of the company he founded.

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This time next week Beth Comstock will be reporting to work as SVP and CMO of GE, not president of integrated media for NBC Universal. Comstock, announced today as GE SVP and CMO, knew when she got on the phone with me today that her assurance in early January about not going back to GE was bound to come up: “At that point, it was still something we were talking about as out in the future. … In the past month, we started talking about it with a specific target date.”

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When a casual session with reporters following his appearance at the NBA Tech Summit turned to a la carte pricing and set-top box limitations, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin offered his usual example of what’s wrong: cable. But when he was reminded–OK, by me, since I have a DirecTV TiVo that’s functionally crippled–that cable isn’t alone when it comes to limiting services and access on set-tops or alone on programming prices, Martin insisted, “I’m not picking on cable. … Cable is the easiest analogy. You’re absolutely right; the same rules apply. Generically, our term is MVPD—multichannel video provider. It’s not just cable, it’s also satellite or telephone companies, whoever’s providing your multichannel video services. All these rules should be the same for all of them. … These are the rules that apply to everyone.” He also talked about the 700-MHz auction, bandwidth management, a la carte, competition and Sirius-XM.

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Twentieth Century Fox actually has two deals with Apple that Steve Jobs announced today with Fox Filmed Entertainment CEO Jim Gianopulos. A lot is being made of the video rentals, more on that in a bit. But we’ll start with a look at the DVD-download combo; the Apple version is only available for now with Fox. Fox first tried it with Windows on “Live Free or Die Hard.” Buyers get a digital version on the second disk of special editions; it can be uploaded to a computer and moved to portable devices. In iTunes’ case, the digital copy file goes straight to iTunes and can be used with only one iTunes library; it can be used on a PC or Mac, video iPods, iPhone or Apple TV.

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When Marco Boerries and David Filo joined Jerry Yang on the stage of the Las Vegas Hilton Theater to show off new launches and upcoming concepts, the audience at their feet included most of Yahoo’s top management–among them Jeff Weiner, whom we last heard from here after he shook up the Yahoo Media Group. Weiner seemed a little taken aback by my comparison of Yang’s presentation with the one Terry Semel gave in 2006, particularly with how many elements of the strategy–for instance, Go, the three-screen approach to connecting–were still in place albeit evolving.

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You’re reading it here first…The details are still a little sketchy but Drew Buckley, who headed Yahoo Originals, and Jeff Karish, head of media strategy, have left the company and are joining former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel in a revamped version of Windsor Media, the investment firm he started before leaving to head Yahoo. (Semel still is the chairman of Yahoo’s board of directors.) Buckley and Karish confirmed that they left Yahoo at the end of the year. That was as far as they are willing to go for now; in fact, the fact that they were joining Windsor was still supposed to be hush-hush. Also joining the group, we’ve confirmed: Jimmy Yaffe, managing partner of Endeavor Marketing Solutions.

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Back in the Hilton Theater Monday afternoon for a session with execs from Hollywood–Albert Cheng, EVP-digital media, Disney-ABC Television Group; Dan Fawcett, president, Fox Digital; Tom Lesinski, president, Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment; and four days into the job, Thomas Gewecke, president of Warner Bros. Digital Distribution.

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I’m about 20 rows back in the Palazzo Ballroom waiting for Bill Gates to deliver his eighth consecutive pre-CES keynote, but Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has a front-row seat. He’s next to Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman, sitting roughly where he was this time last year with MTVN’s Judy McGrath. The keynote–the last for Gates before he moves away from heading Microsoft full-time later this year–has just started…

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Yet another example of bricks-and-mortar scale not translating to online sales power and of grand plans deflating. Reuters reports that Wal-Mart, one of the largest sellers of DVDs, shut down its same-day-as-DVD video download service, citing Hewlett Packard’s decision to discontinue the service that powered it. The plug was pulled Dec. 21, far more quietly than the movie/TV download service began in February. No download details, but you have to think if the service was successful, Wal-Mart would have found a new vendor to keep it going.

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