News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch has referred to Google "stealing" or "taking" his copyright. His Wall Street Journal lieutenant Robert Thomson has likened the company to a "parasite or tech tapeworm." But now News Corp. needs to renegotiate a lucrative MySpace ad deal with Google. Whoops.

Dear Ryan:

As I head to NBC to run its Bay Area site, I'm leaving you one Silicon Valley gossip blog, used but in good condition. A few thoughts on how to keep it that way.

Sony Pictures employees can now waste their time on MySpace again, thanks to Valleywag. (You're welcome.) Here's the tale, from inside Sony's Internet operations, of how our story got the ban lifted.

A tipster tells us that when Sony employees in L.A. try to log onto MySpace, "it directs you to google.com." Bizarrely, Sony's IT staff is saying it's MySpace's fault.

The Twittersphere is up in arms over a move the message-broadcasting service made to make its site a bit less noisy: You can no longer easily eavesdrop on conversations with strangers. Hurrah!

Yesterday, asshole expert Jared Paul Stern identified German "Prince" Marcus von Anhalt as the "World's Richest Asshole." Like all noblemen, the Prince has a Myspace page:

MySpace gossip about an affair allegedly ended in a Staten Island murder.

Things were simpler when the only medium for asking someone out was the telephone. Text messaging, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace have complicated romance, if not ruined it, the Washington Post reports.

Hipster Grifter Kari Ferrell sounds really clever until you notice she just re-used a few key lines over and over, via email. Uh, outrage! New email evidence concerns her imaginary beard-based coffee table book:

Just a few years ago, venture capitalists pushed Internet startups to conquer every last corner of the world. Now they're asking why they don't just pull the plug on the Third World.

Owen Van Natta, Facebook's former COO, is officially taking over MySpace, News Corp.'s social network. With its user numbers stagnant, MySpace desperately needs a restart. Is Van Natta the guy to do it?

Will anyone miss GeoCities, the antiquated homepage service Yahoo bought for $3.5 billion in 1999, and then left to rot? Venture capitalist Fred Wilson will — he hasn't seen that kind of payday in ages.

• Arthur Sulzberger Jr. says he has no plans to take the New York Times Co. private, despite "brutal conditions" that threaten his paper's survival. [NYT]
• Meanwhile, Moody's has downgraded the NYT Co.'s credit rating. [E&P]
• A few theories on why Peter Kaplan departed Jared Kushner's Observer, and what's in store for Kaplan—and the paper—in the future. [WWD]
• Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta is the new CEO of MySpace. [WSJ]
• Is GE looking to sell NBC Universal to Time Warner? It's possible! [TDB]
• Ambushing the ambusher: Staking out the home of Jesse Watters, the Fox News producer who stalks liberals for Bill O'Reilly. [Gawker]

The most amusing thing about fameballs is when they don't realize their balls have stopped rolling. Such is bulldog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis's lot, as he desperately tries to pose as MySpace's next CEO.

Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta is the frontrunner to replace Chris DeWolfe as MySpace CEO. Blog lordling Jason Calacanis has been jokingly nominated for the News Corp. gig. Here's who should get it.

Sucking up to the CEO's wife is usually a wise move. But did it doom MySpace chief Chris DeWolfe?

The magical internet has coughed up a cached version of hipster grifter Kari Ferrell's painstakingly quirky Myspace page. And Kari Ferrell detritus has already hit Ebay! Click through for more aggressisexual grifter crapola.

This photo of JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon holding up his fists ready to throw down? It's not just for show. If Chase loans you money to, say, buy a Mercedes SUV and you don't pay the bank back, Dimon will use any means necessary to insure you follow through. At least that's what a man named James Ricobene claims, who is now suing JPMorgan Chase for allegedly resorting to dirty tactics to collect the collateral on a car loan. Ricobene says Chase hired a shady collection outfit to harass him and posted a threatening message on his daughter's MySpace page vowing to report the 2007 Mercedes GL450 as stolen and put him in jail for two years if he didn't come up with the goods. We can't imagine Dimon would condone such unethical conduct, if only because he probably doesn't even know what MySpace is. But Ricobene probably shouldn't have been in this position to begin with, especially since he happens to be the president of a company called Cash Flow Consultants Inc. The full suit after the jump!

Palin's Deceptions, a meticulous, obsessive blog devoted to proving that Sarah Palin is not the mother of Trigg, has published an exhaustive "analysis" of Bristol Palin's MySpace messages going back to 2005.

If you write something on the Internet, you can't later claim it was private. That's the surprisingly commonsensical ruling in the case of Cynthia Moreno, a California college student who sued her hometown newspaper.