Chris Williams / The Register:
Murdoch sees MySpace miss targets  —  MySpace has missed its financial targets, showing that social networking is struggling to earn its keep - even as part of Rupert Murdoch’s globe-spanning media empire.  —  News Corp said yesterday that the site will fall short of its annual revenue target of $1bn […]

Greg Sandoval / CNET News.com:
TorrentSpy to appeal whopper legal judgment  —  TorrentSpy intends to appeal a court decision that requires the now-defunct search engine to pay $111 million in damages to the six largest film studios, according to the company’s attorney.  —  Ira Rothken has defended TorrentSpy since 2006 …

Jason Mick / DailyTech:
Microsoft Doesn’t Want Yahoo Back, Enjoys “Independence”  —  Bill Gates delivers an address seemingly making it clear that Microsoft doesn’t want to re-enter talks in the near future  —  After Microsoft rejected Yahoo’s demands for more money by dropping its merger offer …

Robert McMillan / IDG News Service:
Mozilla: Firefox Plugin Shipped With Malicious Code  —  Mozilla warned Wednesday that a malicious program inserted adware code into a Firefox plugin that has been downloaded thousands of times over the past three months.  —  Because of a virus infection, the Vietnamese language pack …

Josh Catone / ReadWriteWeb:
Microsoft’s Brand Confusion Runs Deep  —  The LiveSide blog today took a look at all the different bits of Microsoft’s Live.com search universe and found that while the new look may live up to the stated design principle of “Simple and powerful.  Human.  Fast.” it doesn’t provide a common, unified experience.

Michael Masnick / Techdirt:
Ideas Are Everywhere… So Why Do We Limit Them?  —  from the gladwell-missing-the-point dept  —  Malcolm Gladwell is a truly fantastic writer.  However, sometimes he gets so interested in making a story sound good that he misses the real point.  His latest piece for the New Yorker starts …

Mark Hendrickson / TechCrunch:
SlideShare Secures $3M for Embeddable Presentations  —  Sometimes the simplest ideas are best.  While a number of startups are working to bring the whole process of creating presentations online, SlideShare recognizes that many people are mostly satisfied with PowerPoint or Keynote.

Cesar Menendez / Zune Insider:
Just So No One Gets the Wrong Idea. . .  I hope you are all having a great time discovering all the cool stuff in the 2.5 release.  —  We have seen some chatter in the blogosphere over the last 24 hours around a couple of posts speculating about what […]

Stefanie Olsen / CNET News.com:
Can SlideShare make PowerPoint sharing interesting?  —  Many people think PowerPoint is a reason for a nap.  But an Internet start-up that helps people share slideshows online has got the attention of several prominent Silicon Valley investors.  —  On Thursday, San Francisco-based SlideShare …