I jumped right to the story when I saw the TechMeme header" Diller: IAC would love to have Yahoo Personals"-- because it is a nice fit for IAC's Match.com business.

The Diller quote is: "We are very interested, we would love to have Yahoo Personals, and I think there are some initial discussions about that. Whether that would go anywhere or not is, of course, enormously speculative, but I think Yahoo has said it's not an absolute core asset to their future, and it is core to us, personals, we are unquestionably the leader in the category...we're very aggressive behind Match, and any possibilities for increasing its hegemony in the world."

What is fascinating about this quote is that Diller doesn't say that the best reason to absorb Yahoo Personals is to a) take their traffic and crush all the other big dating sites b) switch the business dynamics with Yahoo as it charges Yahoo! up the wazoo to offer an IAC  dating service that Yahoo gets a small percentage of rather than a big service Yahoo can run lean and mean as a cash cow and keep all the profit.

Sadly for Yahoo! Personals, the property is in a grey zone where the company just doesn't want to invest but giving the business to a third party competitor isn't attractive either. 

Of course, maybe Carol Bartz will actually make a more pragmatic business decision and let Y!P go. (And I love the idea of other sites calling to see if Y!P is really in play...just sayin')