Following Microsoft’s bid to take Yahoo, interest is circulating around another former Internet giant, AOL. According to Marketing Shift blogger John Gartner, Comcast is interested in grabbing AOL’s assets away from TimeWarner which conveniently wishes to shed them. Comcast’s interest is bound to pique Google’s, which already has a 5% interest in AOL.

Interestingly, Comcast and Google want AOL for completely different reasons. Comcast is one of the largest Telco ISPs in the United States. It wants to absorb AOL’s massive base of dial-up and high-speed subscribers. Google is the largest search engine on the ‘net. It wants to take advantage of AOL’s vast user-audience to expand its own advertising opportunities. Google already serves most ads shown at AOL but it doesn’t want to watch AOL’s market-share go to Comcast.

It is possible for TimeWarner to divide AOL into its two component pieces with ISP services going to Comcast and information services going to Google. Perhaps that would be the best move TW’s board could make. Though it makes sense for the worlds largest traditional publisher to have its own mega-network, TimeWarner has never been able to properly serve its info stream via AOL’s network.

The original plan behind their merger was wonky anyway. Eight years ago, new-media superstar AOL hoped to subsume TimeWarner content and rebrand it AOL-TimeWarner. The plan might have worked had broadband access been widely available in the US at the time. (Ironically, Comcast and other telcos held up broadband access in the US for years in a court fight with other Internet providers such as cable companies.)

As I wrote in yesterday’s analysis of the Microsoft Devil’s deal, things are just starting to get, well, interesting. Along with the assets of major first-tier players like Yahoo and AOL, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the strange land of second and third tier search engines. Watch for a number of smaller entities to change hands, merge with each other or simply sell their assets to fade into the fogs, seen only on the Wayback Machine.

One thing leads to another and so the world goes on. Like shy students at a high school dance, large entities in the tech world are starting to move away from the walls and in towards the business dance floor. All it took was one brave kid to get the others on the dance floor. That Ballmer dances like a jock with Ritalin issues matters less than the fact he got the party started.

Just to keep things interesting, here is a link to video proving Steve Ballmer dances like a jock with a Ritalin issue.