AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

The Wall Street Journal
Firms to Compete With Social Sites That Host Them
The start-up companies that create games and other popular applications for big social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are trying to break into a new business: ad selling.
Backed by venture-capital money, these companies, including start-ups such as RockYou and iLike, are under pressure to [...]

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Silicon Alley Insider
Here’s a tale of two sites, or perhaps a case study in the promotional power of MySpace. “Special Delivery,” MySpace’s hidden camera Web video series, is a hit on MySpace TV, where it gets front-page promotion. On YouTube? Not so much, even though the show has a dedicated channel.
Take a look at last [...]

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Digital Media Wire
News Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace on Thursday announced the public launch of its Application Gallery, which features more than 1,000 approved applications for the service developed using the Developer Platform the company launched in February. MySpace rival Facebook has been offering a developers’ platform since last May, while Google announced its OpenSocial social [...]

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Variety
Exec named VP of marketing and content
MySpace has upped Jeff Berman to prexy of sales and marketing.
In the newly created position, he will work closely with advertisers to develop customized campaigns for the social network’s growing lineup of programming. He reports to CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe.
Formerly, he was exec VP of marketing and content. [...]

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Business Week
With CD sales plummeting and music fans swiping songs off the Internet, the major record labels can use all the friends they can get. So Michael Nash, incoming head of digital strategy at Warner Music Group (WMG), is trying to make a few new ones. On Apr. 3, Warner is expected to team up [...]

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Yahoo Joins ‘OpenSocial’ Initiative - The Wall Street Journal
Yahoo Inc. is joining an effort backed by Google Inc. and News Corp.’s MySpace to spur the creation of applications for social networks, a small but growing area of interest among software developers.
Yahoo said Tuesday it will endorse a technical specification called OpenSocial that was initiated by [...]

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What This Man Has Planned for an Encore - Advertising Age
Viacom Chief Philippe Dauman Met a Lofty Digital Revenue Goal. Now He Has the Scale to Do It Again
At the beginning of 2007, Viacom President-CEO Philippe Dauman publicly set an ambitious benchmark for the year: double his company’s digital revenue to $500 million. That’s a [...]

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The Very Model of a Modern Media Mogul - The New York Times
When Michael D. Eisner left the Walt Disney Company in 2005 and set about remaking himself in new media, investing in a video-sharing Web site and starting a digital studio, some people in Hollywood snickered. Here we go, the whispers went, another fading [...]

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Old Media upstart ‘Quarterlife’ gets a Web smackdown - The Los Angeles Times
There was a time, not so long ago, when it felt like everyone was rooting for Marshall Herskovitz to succeed. He and longtime producing partner Ed Zwick were among the fair-haired boys of Hollywood, having produced such classy hit films as “Traffic,” as [...]

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Video’s New Friends - The Wall Street Journal
Social-Networking Sites Ramp Up Original Online Series To Lure Users, Advertisers and Compete With YouTube
College student Zoey Colson joined social-networking Web site Bebo.com last summer for one reason — to watch Bebo’s hit video series “KateModern,” a mystery show about an art student.
To promote the show, whose first [...]

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