• geek love

    Michael Arrington pounding his MySpace source

    When TechCrunch, the blog for startup fetishists, published leaked screengrabs of MySpace's just-launched music service, Michael Arrington wrote: "We’ve been pounding our sources for screenshots of the new service for weeks without any luck." Now we know what he meant. A tipster tells us, and another source confirms, that Arrington's been dating Dani Dudeck, MySpace's VP of global communications, for months. More »

    12:00 PM on Fri Sep 26 2008
    By Nicholas Carlson
    11,090 views, 26 comments

    Most discussed Rachel Marsden: Also, people who use "wait for it" as a splicer should be stood up against the nearest wall and shot. more »

  • music

    MySpace launches music site, biz prays it's the next MTV

    MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe wanted a one-stop music shop that would have included event ticket and merchandise purchases along with streaming audio and paid downloads. What he got were agreements from the four major labels for the streaming audio and a deal with Amazon to sell digital downloads. Which is something. Also, there's handful of big-name sponsors like McDonald's and Toyota, and MySpace certainly still has a huge user base of music lovers. Whether or not this is "the one" for the record industry remains to be seen. How's the service? More »

    7:20 AM on Thu Sep 25 2008
    By Jackson West
    372 views, Comment

  • digital music

    MySpace Music -- like Muxtape, except people who wear deodorant will use it

    MySpace Music, a joint venture between the News Corp. social network and music labels Universal, Sony and Warner,finally launches next week, says Fortune, though it still won't have a CEO. MySpace users will be able to listen to and organize playlists full of songs from all three music labels for free. (EMI is the lone holdout, which means no coldplay.) Playlists will include affiliate links to Amazon.com's MP3 store. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe says ad revenues and song kickbacks are going to save the music industry, replacing lost CD sales. More »

    2:00 PM on Fri Sep 12 2008
    By Nicholas Carlson
    521 views, 5 comments

    Latest by socialmediamojo: Funny how the imeem reference got cut off there.... I'm pretty much expecting myspace music to be a clone of imeem more »

  • Next Establishment

    Once again, Vanity Fair leaves geeks at the kids' power table

    Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, or Hollywood-crossover types like Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee turned movie producer. Walt Mossberg, now employed by New Establishment perennial Rupert Murdoch, also squeaked in. The consolation prize Vanity Fair offers: Its "Next Establishment" list, reserved for the likes of Twitter's Ev Williams. It's a marvelous piece of New York media trickery — flatter the geeks by making them feel included, but corral them into a side room so the real power brokers aren't offended by comparison. True, the "Next Establishment" suggests that these are people who might matter in the future. But in saying that, Vanity Fair's editors are also sending the message that right here, right now, its "Next" nominees are nobodies. On this year's list: More »

    1:00 PM on Wed Sep 3 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    861 views, 5 comments

    Latest by Robleh: I doubt they would put Murdoch's wife on a list of nobodies. more »

  • jackpot

    Chris De Wolfe's gain is Fox execs' loss

    News Corp.'s online arm, Fox Interactive Media, has struggled to attract online talent while paying them like a startup would. (News Corp. shares just don't cut it.) The solution for the unit, which includes MySpace and a passel of lesser-known websites: a long-term incentive plan, or LTIP, which offers a sort of phantom equity to executives in the division. In the last few weeks, the numbers for the most recent fiscal year which ended June 30 were distributed, and they were "disastrously low," says a tipster. "Most executives were already looking to leave," he says. "They hated FIM and the only reason they were staying was because of promises made about the LTIP." True, FIM hasn't quite made its aggressively optimistic numbers. But executives believe the real reason their bonuses are so low is MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe's fat contract. More »

    2:00 PM on Fri Aug 15 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    1,286 views, 5 comments

    Latest by Furious George: @transparency: It looks like one of those circa-mid-1990s knit sweatshirts, a.k.a., a drug rug. more »

  • nerdspotting

    MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe out and about with Paris Hilton

    That's so not hot: Chris DeWolfe, the CEO of MySpace, is dating Paris Hilton, Michael Arrington reports. Or if not dating, they've at least been seen together a lot, from Hollywood to the Hamptons. We wonder: Is it a coincidence that Hilton has fallen into DeWolfe's circle? Only two months ago, we reported how MySpace's security holes had further exposed the starlet, by making her supposedly private photos on the social network public. DeWolfe is married, but separated; Hilton has another boyfriend. So perhaps this isn't so much dating as tech support. More »

    12:01 AM on Sat Aug 9 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    5,792 views, 15 comments

    Latest by Web2PointOhShit: @Lawrence: Are you talking about Hilton or DeWolfe? :P more »

  • slingshot labs

    MySpace incubator succeeds at reeling in wayward employee

    Little has been heard from Slingshot Labs, the startup "incubator" News Corp. formed in February, in the months since its creation. The $15 million fund for spinoff ventures did succeed in keeping MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe in place: We hear that he made it a quid pro quo before signing a new, lucrative contract with Rupert Murdoch. He's not the only MySpace employee Slingshot played a part in keeping down in Los Angeles. We hear Nick Granado, a top engineer behind MySpace's iPhone version, first flirted with a job at Facebook, then worked briefly at Imeem, before getting lured back with a gig at Slingshot. More »

    9:40 AM on Fri Jul 18 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    873 views, Comment

  • once you're lucky, twice you're good

    F is for Fitzpatrick, and "hookers and blow"

    LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is a prankster, as evidenced by his Halloween costume last year, when the new Googler dressed up as Facebook to mock his coworkers' fears of the social network. I'm told that in Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, Sarah Lacy's new book about Web 2.0, there's an anecdote about Fitzpatrick submitting an expense report — successfully! — for "hookers and blow" when he worked at blog software startup Six Apart. That was likely a reference to the early days of LiveJournal, when users made ridiculous accusations that Fitzpatrick was spending money meant for servers and bandwidth on "hookers and blow." We'd love to hear more, but alas, Fitzpatrick only got 8 out of 294 pages, according to the book's index. Here's the page for "D" through "F": More »

    1:00 PM on Fri May 9 2008
    By Owen Thomas
    2,334 views, 7 comments

    Latest by BobDope: The way to do this is a naming convention where your servers are named things like hookers and blow. more »

  • exits

    News Corp. boss reorganizes Fox Interactive, cans top sales guy

    Fox Interactive Media — the unit overseeing MySpace and other News Corp. online properties — will miss its fiscal-year revenue projections of $1 billion by more than 10 percent, or $100 million, the WSJ reports. As a result, Fox Interactive chief revenue officer Michael Barrett is out of a job. The big problem is making money off of MySpace. It has lots of users, but as MySpace advertising partner Google has discovered, brands don't want to put their product next to Tila Tequila. So now MySpace is going to try something we thought Facebook would do — create an ad network that targets MySpace members when they visit third-party sites. It'll be called the "Fox Interactive Media Audience Network," and Adam Bain will run it. PaidContent obtained a memo from Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media on the reshuffling and it's pasted below. More »

    6:00 AM on Fri Apr 4 2008
    By Nicholas Carlson
    1,019 views, Comment