Barry Diller is paring down IAC/InterActiveCorp, his Internet business variety shop, with the spinoff of four of its largest units. It’s enough to get media folks chattering, but what for? Here’s a look around the news and the blogs to get some perspective.

Reuters : We use a Diller comment from earlier today to show that anything could happen before the spinoff, including the possibility that buyers could surface: “We’re up for anybody talking to us about anything,” he said. “In doing this, essentially you’re setting up the first domino … anything can happen between the announcement of this and going out as five separate companies.”

The Wall Street Journal : The breakup signals that Mr. Diller’s effort to build a multimedia empire over the past dozen years hasn’t worked. Mr. Diller built IAC through numerous acquisitions, starting in the mid-1990s when he got control of HSN and a group of TV stations in a deal with Liberty Media Corp. Numerous acquisitions - and asset sales — created a company Mr. Diller described today as a “complex enterprise.”

TechCrunch’s headline reads “Barry Diller’s empire to break into tiny little bits:” Telecom mogul John Malone has been putting the squeeze on his old buddy Barry Diller, who runs IAC. So what does Diller do? Break his search and e-commerce conglomerate into five parts.

CNN’s Paul La Monica : Scott Devitt, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, said the split does make it easier for Liberty to eventually buy HSN. “Over time, this increases the chance that, rather than Malone and Diller fighting over HSN, the market will decide its value and Liberty can make a choice to buy or not buy HSN,” Devitt said.

The New York Times’s Saul Hansell, writing in the DealBook blog: The bigger question is whether it is possible for anyone to build the General Electric of the Internet, as Mr. Diller was trying to do. The stock market won’t let it happen. When an Internet company becomes a hit, it grows so rapidly, and investors get so excited about its possibilities, that its value as an independent company can be enormous. Look no further than the $15 billion valuation Microsoft agreed to for Facebook. Companies like that need to be independent so they can use their high value to raise capital cheaply and make acquisitions with their highly priced shares.

As a footnote to that last one, Diller said that none other than Jack Welch of GE fame advised him on how to break apart IAC. So it goes.

(Photo: Reuters)