BusinessWeek reports:

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

To put this into perspective you have to remember that when “maverick” Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, he paid $580 Million. 

When reading this rumor about Steve’s negotiations with Hollywood studios a funny thought occurred to us.

With the debut of Apple’s true video iPod on the horizon, sources have told Think Secret “the eleventh hour” has approached in negotiations between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and major powers in the industry over how to offer movies on-demand and that the situation is not looking good for larger deals.
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According to a highly placed industry executive, talks between potential partners from movie distributors and Apple have been in “the fast mode” for the past three months on how to sell full-length feature films through Apple’s iTunes service. Major obstacles remain to a finished deal, however.

Steve Jobs has now developed a perfectly, vertically integrated pipeline for content. Think about it. He is the CEO of Apple who makes the iPod and the Mac Mini, both excellent hardware solutions for enjoying music and movies. The iTunes Music Store is fast becoming the most popular media streaming app on the internet, surpassing even Real Player with about 30 million users. And to top it all off, he is now a chairman of Disney having ruled over Pixar for decades.

Steve now creates content, distributes content and sells the hardware to play the content. That’s quite an empire you’ve got there Mr. Jobs.

“Gold Farming” is the pejorative that American gamers use for players in less developed nations who are paid to sit and play games all day:
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Ge Jin, a PhD student from UCSD, is making a video documentary of the gold farming phenomenon (preview here). The documentary preview shows some of his interviews with Chinese workers in various gold farming workshops. In our conversations over email, he has brought up some interesting points based on his observations. He’s also looking for feedback and suggestions for important research questions and different points of view.

This is an interesting phenomenon: In less developed nations, people tend to live cash-poor but time-rich lives. Which they then exchange with people in developed nations who have the opposite situation. There are Americans who are willing to exchange cash for these goldfarmed characters TO SAVE TIME. That is the whacky world we live in.

This is so sad and yet fascinating like watching a car wreck. [via Terra Nova]

In what is perhaps the most oxymoronic headline ever, the Guardian reports that the latest proponent of the death-of-dinosaur-media is none other than ol’ Rupert himself:

Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today’s internet pioneers with explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a “second great age of discovery”.

The News Corp media magnate nurtures a long-held distaste for “the establishment” but last night confided to one of the few clubs to which he does belong - The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers - that he may be among the last of a dying breed.

“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry - the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors,” said Mr Murdoch, having flown into London from New York after celebrating his 75th birthday on Saturday.

Don’t you just love it when the man who symbolizes the most powerful and elite of all media barons rails against the power of the elite media barons?

This guy must hang out on Myspace too much.

Seems the local TV business isn’t as profitable as it used to be:

Sinclair Broadcast Group is planning to shut down local newscasts in several markets, including Milwaukee, Raleigh, Buffalo and Tampa. Several Sinclair affiliates will be impacted by the closure of the UPN and The WB networks. Some Sinclair stations might not join the new CW network.

What could possibly be the cause of scrapping of local TV news. It couldn’t possibly be the internet…

Seems like sanity is busting out all over the TV world:

YouTube.com, a popular video-sharing Web site that was smacked around in recent weeks by CBS and NBC, is starting to make friends in the TV world.

The site has struck its first formal partnership to obtain copyrighted content with MTV2, a cable channel overseen by Viacom’s MTV Networks, a spokesman confirmed.

Assuming that MTV2 doesn’t go out of business tomorrow, we hope this will be taken as a good sign throughout the industry.

Someone in TV-land is finally getting a clue:

“Mike Shaw [ABC president ad sales and marketing] announced today we are going to take a product to market in May. Viewers will have the ability to access shows such as “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” on ABC.com. They will be ad supported, free to the consumer.” Ads that accompany the video offering would not necessarily be the same as those that appeared alongside ABC’s hit programming, he said.

A genius move that gives advertisers the kind of metrics they can only dream about in Nielsens-land while tossing free candy to any loyal viewers of their shows. Who needs a Tivo to record missed episodes? Who needs to spend $400 on an iPod to watch episodes from iTunes? If we get TV free because of ad-support why not do the same for downloads. Will people rip ads out of the episodes and post them to all the P2P or video distribution web sites? Of course, but they would have done that anyways.

Good job ABC, it looks like Steve Jobs is already having an effect on you.

If you’re in the TV business, you probably shouldn’t read the WSJ’s coverage of the American Association of Advertising Agencies’ annual conference:

Much chatter this year is likely to center on marketers’ increasing demands for better measurement of the effectiveness of their commercials. Advertisers are no longer content with simple measures such as circulation numbers or Nielsen ratings that measure how many people see a particular magazine, newspaper or TV show. Increasingly, marketers want an idea of how many consumers remembered an ad, for instance, or recalled it when making a decision to buy a particular item.

Driving this emphasis is the rise of increasingly measurable Internet advertising and a perception that mainstream ad outlets, like TV, have become less effective. Rising numbers of consumers have digital video recorders, which allow consumers to skip through TV spots.

Look, the WSJ is ripping quotes almost verbatim from us. It is amazing how much more data computers give you about your audience than the ridiculous voodo of the Nielsens. Goodbye TV, hello Net.

Jeff Jarvis (creator of Entertainment Weekly) once again waxes eloquently on the death of journalism:

When I do my scary blogboy dance for old-media companies, I warn them that their real successor - the true media mogul of the age - is not someone they know, not someone named Murdoch, Hearst, or Newhouse. He is Kevin Rose, the scruffy geek behind Digg.com, a site where users edit the news. In him, we see the media industry of the future.

While anyone should be amused by a “blogboy dance” (what is that? hopping around with treo and powerbook precariously balanced on your head?) it is most certainly an attempt to soften the your-business-plan-is-dying blow.