How badly does News Corp. want to move MySpace out the door? During yesterday's quarterly earnings call with analysts, News Corp. president and COO Pete Chernin and chairman Rupert Murdoch said they haven't discussed a merging properties with Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo in quite some time. Like maybe 14 days. Chernin: "I have not had a conversation with Microsoft or AOL in a couple of weeks." Rupert Murdoch "Nor have I." Silicon Alley Insider doesn't believe the disclaimers, reminding us that at the end of the last quarter, Murdoch denied interest in Yahoo even as he'd ordered a team to make the deal happen.

The conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that MySpace, based in Los Angeles, is a tech nightmare, blaring songs through a user's speakers while crashing all the time. Skilled engineers are in short supply down south, so the website must be falling over all the time, right? Not so. Pingdom, a website-monitoring service, has tracked how often some of the top social networks have gone offline. Twitter, based in Web-savvy San Francisco, has been down for 37 hours from January through April. MySpace has been up 99.96 percent of the time. That's 33 percent less downtime than Yahoo 360, and 60 percent less than Google's Orkut. Score one for the LA crowd. The chart:

The music snobbery is going to get a whole lot thicker on MySpace now that thousands of independent labels have signed on for "virtual major" Merlin.

Like an Iconoclasts that thanks you for the add, MySpaceTV's Artist on Artist pits star vs. star in a Battle Royale of Big Ideas and Mutual Tucheslecking. The only loser? You! See if you can pin the following quotes from Diablo Cody and John Cusack's recent Artist on Artist pairing to the appropriate speaker. To heighten the difficulty level a bit, we've also thrown in a few quotes from beloved TV landscape artist, Bob Ross:

The Hollywood Hills home of MySpace quasi-cofounder and acquisitive LiveUniverse CEO Brad Greenspan was broken into over the weekend, and authorities think it could be the work of a cat burglar who has preyed on the wealthy, including the likes of Charlize Theron and Faith Hill, and their hillside hideaways. Looks like everybody's MySpace friend, Tom Anderson, made the right move by choosing Santa Monica.

Mandatory age checks aimed at verifying users may not do much to protect children on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and other social networks. A task force on the behavior of teens on social networks found that the majority of young people who've actually had sex with adults they met online did so without any sort of deception. Does this mean that men in their fifties no longer have to go about pretending they like Hannah Montana if they want the affections of the underaged? No, it just means they're already onto you, dude. (Photo by generated)

Sources familiar with Microsoft tell the WSJ they expect CEO Steve Ballmer to target another large Internet company for acquisition soon. Noting that few companies have the size to boost Microsoft's business, Ballmer himself listed Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace as properties that could help Microsoft control the Internet as it did the personal computer. Others want Ballmer to buy AOL for its massive and cheap inventory. (What, are they pulling for a Nsync reunion tour as well?) Microsoft could easily better Yahoo's $10 billion offer for AOL, says SAI's Henry Blodget. But there's a reason AOL is cheap, people.

Former Fox Interactive exec turned venture capitalist Ross Levinsohn only needs to finish the paperwork to become the biggest name on Microsoft's list of 10 nominees to replace Yahoo's board, TechCrunch reports and BoomTown confirms. The high-profile rubber-stamping position should suit Levinsohn's ego just fine.

Remember that one funny show on Current? Super News, the animated series that brought you Perez Hilton's giant vagina, has an episode about Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life. A little dated but still funnier than that Internet Party skit. My favorite bit is site founder Tom's first principle of MySpace: "Skanky pictures of skanky people doing skanky things."

Since she landed the job last summer, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram has subpoenaed social networks JuicyCampus and MySpace over problems related to sex offenders and other offensive material. Maybe Pennsylvania's governor should go after fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin? In the following clip from NBC's on-going verité series about the company's Scranton branch, Dunder Mifflin Infinity project manager Ryan Bailey Howard explains that yes, the company's online paper store — also a social network — experienced some difficulties with pedophiles, but that police have dealt with the matter. He also explains to staff that the paper company's need for social networking features on its online store will become obvious in version "two dot oh."

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Not content to pin the blame for Internet prostitution on usual suspect Craigslist, Kenneth Franzblau — New York State's director of Human Trafficking Prevention — cites MySpace as a hotspot of criminal sexual activity. Franzblau is an Eliot Spitzer appointee. You'd think maybe, prior to the former governor's departure in a prostitution scandal, he'd have briefed Franzblau on how to actually find hookers on the much-blinged social network. Could someone forward him a link to the following helpful tips?

MySpace has a new ad boss: former marketing head Jeff Berman. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch canned the last one, Mike Barrett, for his inability to reach aggressive revenue targets. To avoid the same fate, Berman seems to have decided to follow a strategy we've heard MySpace has been following since at least last fall: Copy Facebook page by page.

Rupert Murdoch's new handpicked president of FIM Audience Network, Adam Bain, has the requisite big idea to save MySpace: an ad network which lets his salespeople sell ads all over the Web, not just on MySpace and other News Corp. sites.The idea is to take what MySpace has learned about its own users and share it with publishers and advertisers, to better target ads. What behavioral insights Bain expects to garner from "thanks for the add" isn't clear. But at this point the Fox Interactive Media Audience Network remains little more than a thought bubble — and Bain left it to MySpace's top US sales exec, Bryce Emo (pictured), to deliver the news.

Target's ad buyer, Stephen Dwyer, said the Valley needs to better educate buyers by sharing data. Coca-Cola's Tara Scarlett agreed and added that website owners have to explain to ad agencies who their users are and why they're valuable. Or, as two ignorant bloggers explained to David Spark at last night's Revision3 party, "Ad buyers, they're like junkies. And the people who sell advertising are like drug dealers. Facebook needs to better explain how to pack the crack pipe and smoke it."

In the month since San Francisco-based social network Hi5 launched its platform for independent applications, users have installed widgetmaker RockYou's applications 2 million times. The most popular third-party application on MySpace only has 100,000 installs. The difference? Hi5 links to its application directory from user profile pages and allows application makers to send notification messages to users. Those simple interface elements allow Hi5 users to see which applications their friends are using, which then prompts them to add them, too — the main factor in their spread. MySpace is still working on those kinds of tools, reports VentureBeat. Facebook built those types of innovations into its platform nearly a year ago.

Giant-footed reptilian invader Paris Hilton is denying reports that only a few trannies auditioned be on her upcoming reality show. And, no, she's not counting little Scotty Mouthbreather. From her MySpace page (Sic, sic on all of this!): "And just to clear up any misinformation you may have heard, there are NO open calls for the show! Everyone they invite has applied thru the site and they've picked out the best contenders to interview. With so many applications to go thru they are trying their utmost best to read and contact everyone from the official casting application." [HollyScoop] Full silly blog post after the jump.

At MySpace headquarters in Beverly Hills, playbooks are stacked on desks as Rupert Murdoch's minions desperately try to make the numbers on a Yahoo deal work. Murdoch's News Corp. has joined forces with Microsoft in an effort to counter a deal with the mogul's old enemy, Time Warner. Google, which all old-line media companies fear, is approaching a bid with languorous rigor, running a small test of placing its ads on some Yahoo pages. It's all rather depressing.

Police say six teenagers trapped 16-year-old Victoria Lindsay in a house and then beat her until she lost consciousness. Their evidence? Video, which authorities say the girls planned to upload to MySpace and YouTube. Lindsay's mother told Good Morning America she in part blames the site for the attacks. "I don't understand it" Lindsay says in the clip above. "I don't understand how our society has gotten through peer pressure to our kids that's its OK to act in violence and then want to post it on MySpace or YouTube or anywhere else, just for entertainment and a laugh." Ah, whimpering and weeping, the stuff of pure ROFLMAO.

Here's what the CEO of MySpace said about his new deal with three record companies: "This is really a mega-music experience that is transformative in a lot of ways... It's the full 360-degree revenue stream." Using the words "mega-music" and "full 360-degree" in an interview with the Times is, well, it's as vapid and gaudy as your typical MySpace page. Here's a less barf-inducing description of the probably-doomed music site the CEO was talking about: