Annual compensation for CEOs is nearly always a thorny question. Not so ironically, every CEO wants to land on Forbes’ “Billionaire List,” but mention of annual salaries for public companies brings a corporate chorus of no comments or quick stage lefts - helicopter waiting depending on the benefits package.

Via WSJ (including the graphic): Larry Ellison, founder and chief executive of software maker Oracle Corp., topped the list of best-paid executives of public companies during the past decade, receiving $1.84 billion in compensation, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of CEO pay. Coming in No. 2 on the compensation list was Barry Diller, who received roughly $1.14 billion from IAC/InterActive and Expedia.com, the online travel site IAC spun off in 2005, where he remains chairman. Following Mr. Diller [was] Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs with $749 million.

Over the past decade, Ellison has held strong in the face of  Diller and Jobs, who’s comp is mostly in his stock and does not include Pixar/Disney transaction gains. Steve Jobs still remains the largest individual shareholder of Disney, which sums up what a superb brand strategist he is: Apple, then Pixar leading into Disney.

Back to the basics of the the Ten Spot - quick, relevant New Medici reads with an exact dose of interpretation.

1. For Web’s New Wave, Sharing Details Is the Point - NYT DealBook

The transparency brought about by Google search and Facebook community/beacon/(end of) privacy has created a slew of startups who cater to ripping open the social graph and letting everyone peek in, follow and link to your daily activities and habits.

From the likes of DailyBooth.com, Blippy.com and Groupon.com, the concept of “socially challenging” others to share interests in online creation and consumption is trending. The next logical step will be a return to a new and improved Facebook Beacon that extends the group mentality while providing multi-level marketing incentives to the individuals who create interest in new items, i.e., transactions (think ThisNext.com meets Groupon). This allows group rewards and either revshare or ranking points for the individual curators or arbiters of taste.

Blippy, which opened last fall, was the first site to introduce the notion of publishing credit card and other purchases. Last month it attracted around 125,000 visitors and closed an investment round of $11 million from venture capitalists. It hopes to one day to make money by, among other things, taking a commission when people are inspired to imitate their friends’ purchases posted on the site.

To Silicon Valley’s deep thinkers, this is all part of one big trend: People are becoming more relaxed about privacy, having come to recognize that publicizing little pieces of information about themselves can result in serendipitous conversations — and little jolts of ego gratification.

2. Mac & the iPad

Steve Jobs defies the odds (recovering Apple), the gods (surviving cancer) and yet his consumer design “sculpting” and management fearlessness are really the two definitions he will be known by. In this above must-read link, an insider opens up about the mindset and fearset of the leading Designer CEO out there.

From secrecy to ordering the best-of-the-brainstorms (in terms of his managed teams), Jobs is building a line of devices that separate the chaos, the noise and the hacks of more open systems to bring its users a little hardware clarity (and style)…  

A potential interactive page-turner - think iTunes for magazines, books (much less multimedia sexy) and especially daily print.  Time Inc. and The Wonder Factory put together a demo on a HP touchscreen, and for those with tablets, potential online subscription and micro-transactions loom.

Via The Death Of The Blog Post - Smashing Magazine, there’s a discussion of how much the design of individual posts adds value to the read - similar to strong copy, quality posts versus mass-news, pop cultural clippings (aka standard blogs).

Is it the timeliness, frequency or relative exclusivity or breaking news factor that makes certain articles into reader magnets or SEO payloads?

RSS readers are jam-packed with articles every day, and chances are, the articles that don’t get your full attention will get lost in the crowd. Keep your short musings and thoughts for Posterous and Twitter, and spend some real time hand-crafting well-thought-out articles. You’ll satisfy both yourself and your readers.

On an altruistic side, blogs and blog nets create open discussion, communication and the free sharing of news, but if you opt for more design, will the quality of the writing always be premium?

Or does more design - see the Gizmodo/Techcrunch quote after the jump - mean continued budget losses at big publishing houses, tied to high-priced writers? Yes, the design and publishing world will move to the upcoming Tablet like the music labels beat a path to iTunes.

Chart: U.S. Virtual Goods Revenue Ready To Explode | SAI

The virtual goods market in the U.S. is ready to take off. Right now, the U.S. only has 28% of the total market. By 2013, the U.S. will make up 41% of the market with $2.5 billion in sales, according to research from Piper Jaffray.

The Decade of Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple | Fortune

He’s a visionary, but he’s grounded in reality too, closely monitoring Apple’s various operational and market metrics. He isn’t motivated by money, says friend Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500). The financial results have been nothing short of astounding — for Apple and for Jobs. The company was worth about $5 billion in 2000, just before Jobs unleashed Apple’s groundbreaking “digital lifestyle” strategy, understood at the time by few critics. Today, at about $170 billion, Apple is slightly more valuable than Google.

CollegeHumor May Go to Ben Silverman Venture | Advertising Age

The deal would have Connected Ventures, parent of CollegeHumor and just-launched TV-production arm Notional, folded into Electus. [...] Connected Ventures is at the core of those content efforts, but Mr. Diller is said to lack confidence that the group can effectively monetize the properties it creates. Last week, Mr. Diller said investment in original content would account for “less than 10%” of the $1.8 billion the company will have in cash over the next few years.

The End of  ‘Oprah’ as We Know Her: Daytime Diva Giving Up Syndie Talk Show & Moving It To Her Cable Network in 2011| Deadline

One of the biggest questions in the TV biz has been when, and even if, Oprah Winfrey would give up her daytime syndicated talk show to focus on OWN, her long delayed Oprah Winfrey Network in 70 million homes that was supposed to launch in place of the Discovery Health Channel as a joint venture between Winfrey and Discovery Communications.  

via Is Hollywood always in panic mode? Ari Emanuel’s history lesson | The Big Picture | Los Angeles Times

[Ari Emanuel slipped this 1970 Life magazine to his agents recently. Per Patrick Goldstein:] Don’t overreact to the current studio cost-cutting frenzy. As this story makes all too clear, the more things change, the more things stay the same. Studios always think they can make the movie business into a more rational enterprise, but that’s a bean-counter fantasy. Making movies will always require a leap of faith.

Just as today’s studio chiefs think that they can now make “Transformers” and “Hangover”-style hits without movie stars, Bluhdorn was convinced that high-priced talent was superfluous. “You get from these big stars a document of conditions of how many hours they’ll work, what they’ll do and won’t do…. Well, who needs them? With today’s young audiences, names won’t sell a picture anymore. A great script and a devoted director — that’s what makes things happen. Substitute “special effects” for ”script” and you could easily slip those words into any of today’s studio bosses’ mouths.

via YouTube’s Content Head Jordan Hoffner Leaving To Join Ben Silverman’s New Venture | paidContent.

Jordan Hoffner, the head of content partnerships for YouTube, is leaving the company, and joining Ben Silverman’s new content venture at IAC (NSDQ: IACI), we have learned. The move from YouTube was announced internally today. This is the second senior digital exec to join Silverman’s venture, after we first reported on Drew Buckley also joining it last month.

via But Who’ll Break Up The Fistfights? – Deadline.com.

James Murdoch, Howard Stringer, Les Moonves, David Zaslav, and, interestingly, Comcast’s Brian Roberts and GE’s Jeff Immelt back to back, will be speaking at the annual hush-hush Quadrangle confab being held Wednesday and Thursday in NYC. [...] Speakers — Emilio Azcárraga, Grupo Televisa; Dennis Crowley, Foursquare; Barry Diller, Iac; Brian Dunn, Best Buy; Charles Forman & Dan Porter, Omgpop; Reed Hastings, Netflix; Reid Hoffman, Linkedin. More after the jump…  

How’s this for a final (yet not final) corporate act: September 5, 2006, 1,500+ Viacom employees crowded the corporate plaza to wish Tom Freston a goodbye when he was released from his contract by Sumner Redstone. Since that fateful send off, Freston has visited over 30 countries on what some would call a “$60M Sabbatical,” i.e., the amount of severance he received after serving 19 years at Viacom. Add to that, Freston became “non-committal” - not in the typical sense (he still helped causes and companies he admired), but more in the sense that he didn’t need a job as many came calling. He became “The Sabbaticalist.”