BigShinyThing

You’re a media empire but you’re losing hearts and minds to the blogsophere particularly in that ripe and juicy segment of the media known as gossip. You were used to breaking all the celebrity news (after all you had a direct ‘in’ to their people) but now bloggers like Perez Hilton are beating you to it. What do you do? Get your video-paparazzi (the secret weapon) and follow every d and z-lister until you get a money shot. And boy does it work. You even broke the Mel Gibson/anti-semitic drunken outburst story. Now those fiendish bloggers are linking to you and everything is right with the world. For now.

Our current clip of choice? DD-lister Tara Reid gets denied entry to a club whilst Paris Hilton glides by. Watch and marvel. Note to TMZ though. You need to get with the clip culture and give us a nice bit of hackable code (a la YouTube).

CNN, amongst others, reports that Time Warner Inc. is in exclusive talks with Google Inc. about broadening a partnership with Time Warner’s AOL online service. Microsoft Corp., once considered the front-runner for a deal with AOL, is believed to be out of the running.

The Google-AOL talks would expand on a relationship which analysts estimate account for 2 percent to 4 percent of Google’s revenue on a net basis. AOL uses Google’s search engine, and Microsoft had been negotiating to get AOL to use its search technology instead.

AOL is seen as a critical swing factor on search technology traffic among Internet media rivals Google, Microsoft and Yahoo Inc., just as it once was with online advertising, a category it practically invented in the early 1990s. According to the Time Warner owned CNN, “AOL made surfing the Internet and chatting online a household phenomenon. But it has been a drag on Time Warner’s stock as it has lost millions of dialup Internet subscribers since the merger of America Online and Time Warner in 2001. Since then, the Dulles, Virginia-based unit has focused on providing free programming and services to boost online advertising revenue.”

TheAOL/Time Warner merger is considered by many to have been one of the more disastrous follies of the dotcom era. AOL founder Steve Case last week backed calls for AOL to be split from Time Warner. He told the Washington Post that “Time Warner has proven to be too big, too complex, too conflicted and too slow-moving - in other words, too much like a classic conglomerate - to seize new opportunities.”