MySpace

—Roku player gets Amazon VOD: Owners of the Roku "Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) Player" will soon also be able to download content from Amazon's VOD service. The deal adds more than 40,000 movies and TV shows to the library currently available via Netflix—though Amazon's content is on a pay-per-view model as opposed to Netflix' subscription.

—Tanking job market a boon for LinkedIn : While LinkedIn laid off some 10 percent of its staff in November, the financial crisis hasn't been all bad for the business-focused social network, USA Today reports.

MySpace has introduced a flurry of new applications and services as it transforms into an advertising-supported social portal, chasing the big bucks spent on Yahoo and Google's YouTube. It is aggressively leveraging its 75 million active monthly users, each with about 111 friends and spending an average four hours monthly in ways that Madison Avenue and Hollywood cannot ignore. When you can claim nearly 12% of all Internet minutes in the U.S., people will listen. Jeff Berman, MySpace president of sales and marketing, discussed future plans with MediaPost.

Online video search and identification service Anvato has picked up $2 million worth of a $4 million first round. Oxantium Ventures led the investment, which the Mountain View-based startup will use to launch AdMatch, its video advertising platform. The platform builds on Anvato's fingerprinting technology, which lets publishers track the spread of their clips without the use of meta-data or watermarks.

A MySpace executive suggested Tuesday that using lawyers to shut down unauthorized, consumer-generated fan sites on the social network is a grave mistake. Instead, marketers should look to engage the creators and turn them into brand evangelists. "The best thing to do is empower those individuals as much as possible and engage with them," MySpace VP Jay Stevens said at MediaPost's Email Insider Summit in Park City, Utah.

Around the Net In Online Marketing: MySpace CEO Sees Growth Despite Recession

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe was speaking at the Reuters Media Summit (not open to other reporters, only internal Reuters reporters), and said he is cautiously optimistic about growing its ad revenues in 2009, something that of course he has to say officially. "We're up 18 percent year-over-year as of last quarter," he said and hopes to grow it next year, despite the economic crisis. He continues:

Murdoch's love for newspapers is undying, nevermind the near-death throes of the medium itself, and he reads it out (literally, on the radio) as part of a series of Australian radio lectures titled, "The future of newspapers: moving beyond dead trees." Compare and contrast this to his famous speech on April 13,

Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris can never be accused of being shy, or, putting his foot in, oh well...in an extensive interview with Billboard, he talks about the digital piracy issues, UMG's efforts in digital music, working with YouTube and its plans for a Hulu-like music video site, and other issues.