In a move that seems to emulate Yahoo!’s OMG celebrity gossip portal, MySpace has launched a celebrity site that will feature news articles, blogs, videos, and other aggregated content.  MySpace Celebrity will join other channels such as Impact, a political channel and the company also plans on introducing a gaming channel.

MySpace Celebrity will also feature content from official celebrity profiles.  At launch, there will be roughly 300 official celebrity profiles.

“MySpace Celebrity is Hollywood’s new home page,” stated MySpace President/co-founder, Tom Anderson. “Celebrities have been using MySpace since the site’s launch and it’s a natural extension for us to now offer them an aggregated channel where they can be in control of their own image…We want MySpace users to connect with celebrities in the same way that they do with musicians.”

MySpace is the most mainstream social network today.  Given MySpace is backed by a major media company helps sign the company sign advertising deals from all over Hollywood.  This is what gives MySpace Celebrity a competitive advantage over Yahoo! OMG!

Wasserman Media Group is rumored to be in talks with Comcast, ESPN, and FOX about a potential acquisition or investment for Sportnet.  Sportnet started in 2005 and is one of WMG’s subsidiaries.  WMG is one of the largest sports agencies with offices based in Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., Charlotte, Carlsbad, and London. 

Sportnet was founded to aggregate websites and advertisers across various sports websites including motocross.com, and ryansheckler.com.  Montgomery & Co. has valuated Sportnet at $50 million.  WMG has also previously invested in Prep Sports Online and TAKKLE, two high school sports networks.

Information Source:
[1] paidContent: Wasserman May Sell Or Get Invetsment For Sportnet Online Sports Network

Mike Butcher of TechCrunch UK is reporting a story that News Corporation may acquire LinkedIn.  Butcher mentioned that nothing is official, but his source is someone close to the matter.  This deal would indicate that News Corp. really wants to grow up from their reality shows on FOX and their notorious MySpace social network.

News Corp. made a $5 billion acquisition offer for Dow Jones, parent company of The Wall Street Journal.  And Rupert Murdoch, chairman of the media company specifically mentioned that he would want to make WSJ.com available for free.  Integrating LinkedIn with the Wall Street Journal could be an interesting synergy if there is any viability to this rumor.

More details on this rumor after Thanksgiving.

News Corporation-owned social network, MySpace.com has recently launched a mobile version of their site. The official announcement will be made soon. The URL for the mobile site is: http://mobile.myspace.com.

“Accessing the Internet from your mobile phone will soon be as common as text messaging and voice calling,” stated John Smelzer, the senior VP of Mobile at Fox Interactive. Fox is a subsidiary of News Corporation.

Other Fox Interactive Media properities, Photobucket, FoxSports.com, IGN, and AskMen.com will also soon be going mobile. MySpace mobile users will be able to send/receive messages and friend requests, comments, add posts to bulletins, update their blogs, and find/search friends.

Information Source:
[1] Wilmington Star: Myspace to Launch Ad-Supported Cell Phone

As The Simpsons Movie is getting closer to arriving in theaters, the marketing department seems to be trying all sorts of interesting ways to promote the movie. On The Simpsons website, there is a feature that allows users to create their own Simpsons avatar^[1].

Users can choose whether they want their avatar to be male of female and a kid or an adult. After that users can tamper with hair-styles, eye styles, eyebrow thickness, nose structure, lip style, and a color for clothes and skin tone.

The Simpsons is also using MySpace as a major promotional arm^[2]. This may be because FOX owns the rights to The Simpsons and FOX is a subsidiary company of News Corp., the company that also owns MySpace.

The most interesting form of promotion so far to me was when The Simpsons signed a deal with 7-11. About a dozen 7-11s redesigned their convenience stores to look like the Kwik-E-Mart. The Kwik-E-Mart is a store in The Simpsons cartoon that is run by Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian immigrant^[3]. Below is an image I found from Junkyard Clubhouse of the 7-11/Kwik-E-Mart in Mountain View, Calif.^[4]

And here is my Simpsons avatar that slighly resembles me:

[1] SimpsonsMovie.com
[2] MySpace.com: Simpsons page
[3] Wikipedia: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon
[4] JunkYardClubhouse: Kwik-E-Mart Comes to Mountain View

“This will be the largest advertising platform on Earth” stated Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corp. on a media call that was reported on TechCrunch.  What Chernin is referring to is a future product announcement in collaboration with some of the leading media and Internet giants: News Corporation (owner of MySpace), NBC, FOX, AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!.  Advertisers that are already wanting in on the upcoming video website includes Cadbury Schweppes, Cisco Systems, Esurance.com, Intel, and GM.

“This is a game changer for Internet video,” stated Chernin. “We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live. We’re excited about the potential for this alliance and we’re looking forward to working with any content provider or distributor who wants to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity.”

When the video website launches, full episodes and clips of TV shows and movies like 24, Heroes, My Name is Earl, SNL, The Simpsons and movies Devil Wears Prada, Borat, and Little Miss Sunshine will appear on the website.

“This partnership is completely aligned with our continued investment in video on MSN and will allow hundreds of millions of our consumers to tune into a vast library of high-quality, safe and legal online video,“ stated Kevin Johnson, the President of Platform and Services Division at Microsoft Corporation. “Our alliance proves that you can deliver quality online video entertainment and protect intellectual property and copyright at the same time. We look forward to working together to explore additional opportunities to distribute this content across other Microsoft services and devices.”

The content will be delivered to users on News Corp.’s MySpace as well.  MySpace has 65 million users that will have access to the media content.  “The ability to embed video clips within over 160 million profile pages will empower members of the MySpace community to view, share and truly interact with some of the entertainment world’s most popular content,” stated Peter Levinsohn, President of Fox Interactive Media.

The name of the new video website is unknown, but Google executives have coined the gigantic media partnership, “Clown Co.”  I guess that is Google’s executive response to Steve Ballmer’s (CEO of Microsoft) statement: “Google built one very good business. They only have one thing they do. Everything else is sort of cute.”

Today the Wall Street Journal reported that New Corp.’s FOX media company, Viacom Inc., CBS Corporation, and General Electric Company’s NBC Universal are currently in talks about developing a video website to compete with Google Inc.’s YouTube Inc. This information was provided by people that were close to the situation and also Mike Arrington mentioned his awareness on the subject as well in an article entitled ‘The Video Startup That May Never Launch.’ These companies are planning on taking this project with joint ownership which would serve as a primary source for streaming video feeds of the TV shows and other content that these networks provide. This would take marketshare away from YouTube and put advertising money in the pockets of these media titans.

Right now the deal is just in talks and the production of the actual software has not initialized. American Broadcasting Company, who is owned by Walt Disney Co. is not participating in the discussions because the company wants to rely on its own brand recognition.

A lot of these talks were inspired by Rupert Murdoch’s accusation that YouTube’s growth was heavily contributed by a MySpace user’s ability to embed YouTube videos on their personal profiles. At the beginning of the year, Fox, CBS, NBC, and Viacom were considering adding video content to Fox’s MySpace, but later retracted this idea as they did not want their content to be spread across a News Corporation product.

Another feasible option for these media titans is to accept an offer from Google Inc., who are willing to pay $140 million over the course of 3 years to embed content from these networks. NBC and CBS already have deals with YouTube in which these networks have promotional channels for trailers and other content.

Within the last month C-SPAN and Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom ordered that Comedy Central remove The Colbert Report clips from YouTube. BoingBoing has a brief report on why this occurred.

A lawsuit collaboration between News Corp., Viacom, and NBC against YouTube Inc. is still pending over the accusation of copyright infringement. YouTube defends their service by immediately responding to the removal of clips when the copyright holders complain about their content making its way on YouTube. On CNET, it was reported that Mark Cuban and the Los Angeles News Service are potentially teaming up by suing YouTube for the inclusion of the Los Angeles riots and the exclusive police chase of O.J. Simpson.