Power-PR lady Lara Shriftman—she of clients like Kimora Lee Simmons, Gwen Stefani's fashion line L.A.M.B., and, uh, OK! Magazine, and subject of that 1998 New York magazine article about the new breed of power publicists—has a MySpace page! Here's what she has to say about herself:

You're ready to graduate from your grunt gig to something bigger - product management, software architecture, professional services. Maybe a director-level spot for $150K plus 1% of shares outstanding. It's time to log off tribe.net and set yourself up on linkedIn. But first, don't get yourself fired.

Nicole Richie has yet to really settle on what her predominating talent actually is, having already achieved limited success as Paris Hilton's slightly less blank-brained reality show foil, and as a pop singer bemoaning the weed-like qualities of a two-timing ex-lover. But it's her facility with the written word, both as the gifted mind behind the genre-defining skank lit classic The Truth About Diamonds, and as the opinionated voice of her own MySpace blog, where she shines the most. Take, for example, her recent riff on the popular "blind item" format frequently employed by the very gossip columns in which her name regularly appears, wherein Richie expertly teases the reader with details which can only be referring to her recent acrimonious split from professional celebrity clothing-chooser, Rachel Zoe:

Universal Music Group is suing MySpace for copyright infringement, a proceeding Federated Media's John Battelle likens to a "big poo-flinging goat rodeo." At issue is music and video from Universal ending up on various nerds' MySpace pages — what the suit dismissively calls "so-called 'user-generated content.'" The suit claims the content is in fact "user-stolen," which doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Certainly not as jazzy as "goat rodeo."

• Guy who told Murdoch to buy MySpace quits. [Guardian]
  

• Game rating board ESA sues gaming blog Kotaku (a Valleywag brother blog) for writing about the best. gaming t-shirt. ever (pictured). [Kotaku]

Since "most of their traffic comes from us," MySpace's COO famously said about YouTube this September, "we ought to be able to match them if not exceed them" with MySpace's own video tool.

Fox Interactive head (and MySpace buyer for News Corp) Ross Levinsohn (pictured) on Brad Greenspan, the former MySpace founder who's sued MySpace for allegedly lying about its value to investors, and Fox for allegedly censoring him:

The New York Times wanted to illustrate how hard it would be for MySpace to catch on in other countries, now that the company's going international. So they pulled out an obviously typical MySpace user: a 40-year-old man. He "became frustrated by unwanted messages and he did not care for the flashy pages."

• Bill Keller, everyone he knows, disagrees with NYT ombudsman (sorry, "Public Editor") Byron "Barney" Calame on banking story. [NYT]
  

• Today's top deal: Google will start selling ads for over 50 newspapers. [NY Times]

• MySpace blocks users from mentioning another competitor (something it did to sites like Buzznet and Stickam before); competitor gets pissed and launches angry ranty site. [CensorSpace]

Hint for new businesses trying to avoid lawsuits: Don't name yourself after your massive, litigous competitor.

BREAKING NEWS! SEVERAL STUDENTS AT FALLS CHURCH HIGH SCHOOL AREN'T ON MYSPACE AS MUCH AS THEY USED TO BE!

The Wall Street Journal's free online article today features a FUD piece on the decline of MySpace. For the record WSJ's freebies, in the hopes of generating paid subscribers through high blog linkage, tend to have a geek slant to them and for a Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) article that goes double.

MySpace founder, Brad Greenspan, has acquired a majority stake in Flurl, an online video search engine. This is the first acquisition by LiveUniverse, which Greenspan founded to focus on video, entertainment and social networking.

• Denny's opts not to exploit the famous visit by YouTube's and Google's founders in its marketing, probably because of the Google boys' habit of sharing a grand slam and asking to hold the bacon "to cut our country's reliance on cooking oil." [MediaPost]

• Man, this is not the New York Times's best weekend. Their latest gaffe: calling Peter Hirshberg, chairman of blog search company Technorati, the CEO. Poor tech blogger Om Malik was afraid CEO Dave Sifry had been ousted. But Sifry replied on Om's blog that he's still in charge. He tells me the mix-up was probably an innocent mistake by the Times; no one interviewed Sifry for the article. [GigaOM]

"Wired is just Cosmo now," a friend told me last night. "Nothing of substance." Nerdcore rapper MC Router agrees. When Wired published a story by Roger Thomasson on a new Nerdcore compilation, it used outdated slang and misrepresented her, says MC Router. So she wrote a song, UnWired, with lyrics like:

• Novell's former CEO Ray Noorda, praised for growing the company from 17 to over 12,000 employees and maintaining a culture of respect for employees, passed away Monday at the age of 83. [InformationWeek]