When the highlight of the evening is Twitter CEO Ev Williams meeting faded hip-hop star MC Hammer, you know the night was a waste. Indie-music consultant Corey Denis reports that the event "had ten actual music industry people there, tops." MySpace didn't have much to celebrate, either: It has yet to appoint a figurehead CEO to its MySpace Music faux joint venture. The only thing confirmed about Courtney Holt, the MTV executive widely rumored to be taking the job, is his gender. (Photo by Brian Solis/Bub.blicio.us)

I feel sorry for Courtney Holt. Partly because the MTV executive is rumored to be taking a terrible job running MySpace Music, a feature of the social network masquerading as a separate company. But mostly because of his name. In a previous article, I was enough of a bonehead to refer to Holt as "she." Trying to do my part to promote the role of women in the tech industry, okay?

Dear Trendrr publicist who sent us a data dump on the presidential candidates' social-networking prowess a day after the election: Here's your "hit" on a hot "influencer" site that thinks you're "dumb." Hands up, everyone who still cares how many MySpace friends John McCain has this afternoon. Thought so.

Why is it that Courtney Holt, the MTV executive reportedly offered a job running MySpace Music, has yet to take the CEO position there? Because, like the other candidates, he figured out that running a feature of a website is not a real job. v10_medium" alt="Another MySpace Music CEO candidate stalls on the job" title="Another MySpace Music CEO candidate stalls on the job" />

A year ago, Viacom sued YouTube for one billion dollars, claiming YouTube was not blocking uploads of copyrighted Viacom material from Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1 and others. Today, MySpace will join YouTube in running ads targeted to Viacom-owned clips, instead of deleting them. Auditude, a Palo Alto startup, provides the software that identifies Viacom-owned content. Remember when musicians believed all advertising was evil? Now, I'm looking forward to seeing a Big & Rich ad targeted against another Big & Rich ad, overlaid by another Big & Rich ad for a Big & Rich ad I haven't seen yet. Collect them all!

Brad Greenspan, the former CEO of Intermix Media, the company which launched MySpace, loves to make trouble for News Corp., the media giant he claims bought Intermix and MySpace for a song. Too bad he pays more attention to his ongoing, one-sided feud than his revenge vehicle, LiveUniverse. Greenspan's startup is having trouble with his uptime; a tipster says his LiveUniverse and LiveVideo sites have been down for two days running. That's not the real problem; the real problem is that it took two days for anyone to notice they've been down.

Why can't News Corp. find anyone to run MySpace Music, the spinoff from its social network which is part-owned by major labels? No one seems able to state the obvious: MySpace Music is a feature, not a company. The outside investment it garners is just an elaborate way of cutting in the labels on MySpace's music-related profits. No wonder former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta turned down the job; TechCrunch reports that he cleverly tried to get MySpace to buy Project Playlist, a music startup he'd invested in, as part of the deal. Van Natta picked the right test: If MySpace had been willing to fold Project Playlist into MySpace Music, it would have proven that the music venture really had some independence. Any other CEO candidate should ask the same questions Van Natta raised with his quid-pro-quo deal.

Imitation is the sincerest form of getting rich. MySpace got bought early, on the cheap; Facebook has yet to cash out. Michael and Xochi Birch's sale of Bebo, a social network more popular overseas than in the U.S., to AOL for $850 million has been the best social-network cashout to date. And how did they manage it? Shamelessly copying other sites, Xochi Birch admits to the BBC.Ringo, their first social site, was an unabashed copy of Friendster. The husband-and-wife team sold that off to Monster, the job-listings site, for a pittance — but a pittance that provided the seed funding for Bebo, which Xochi openly says was inspired by MySpace. Copy early, copy often, sell out. (Photo by Auren Hoffman)

Downturn? What downturn? Strategically placed sources are whispering that MySpace is likely to hit $1 billion in annual revenue, a jump from its $850 million in revenue last year. The milestone is impressive since MySpace is joining the $1 billion club in only five years, a year faster than Google. Facebook, meanwhile, is just too cool to worry about revenue or releasing products. [VentureBeat]

John McCain's bill to protect the children — Keeping the Internet Devoid of Sexual Predators Act of 2008 (KID SPA!) — has been signed by President Bush. According to an episode of Schoolhouse Rock my boss used to watch, that means it's a law. KIDSPA is based on a half-baked idea by MySpace to create a national database to track registered sexual predators' email addresses. At least now you don't have to wait for version 2.0 for fewer pedophiles. [Wired]

Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker took to MySpace to let fans know how his recovery is going less than a month after he and DJ AM survived a plane crash that killed four—including his personal assistant Chris Baker, and security guard Charles "Che" Still—in South Carolina on Sept. 19. Barker, who was recently transferred from a Georgia hospital to an L.A. burn center says, among other things, that he's given up vegetarianism to aid in his recovery.

Remind us: Were we supposed to be impressed that MySpace's minor update to its music feature, dressed up as a joint venture with the record labels, has streamed 1 billion tunes in "a few days"? Before the launch of MySpace Music, MySpace was already streaming 5 billion songs a month, largely thanks to the blaring, automatically played music on most of its users' profiles. How many days are "a few"? In the ordinary course of business, MySpace would play 1 billion songs anyway — whether anyone liked it or not. You'd have to be sleeping with a MySpace flack to think this was a big story.

News Corp.'s hire of a Yahoo veteran, Valeh Vakili, reported yesterday, as MySpace's senior vice president of sales strategy and operations could prove to be a coup. Madison Avenue only buys ads on News Corp's social network MySpace inventory for their clients "if they have to," one agency exec told me in August. MySpace ads are seen as spammy and unattractive, and agencies don't want to damage their clients' brands by association.But another problem for MySpace has been its ad sales team, which a different agency exec complained to me last month is still full of pre-News Corp. amateurs. MySpace ad sales team in New York needs "a connected, pro leader" whom the agencies know and trust, this source said. "There is nothing so valuable as a professional sales force" — one like Yahoo's. Vakili is the third Yahoo exec to join MySpace in recent weeks.

As Yahoo tries to catch up to Google in automated advertising, it continues to lose the human capital now-departed managers like Wenda Harris Millard so carefully built. The latest defection: Valeh Vakili, an eight-year veteran of the portal's salesforce, who has joined MySpace as a senior vice president in charge of sales strategy, based in New York, the heart of the ad business. The Valley's algorithmists scoff at MySpace's naive "hypertargeting" ad strategy, which lumps users into broad groups (sports fans, for example). And yet those very simple labels are very easy to explain to the very simple people who buy large amounts of advertising. True, MySpace has struggled to meet its revenue targets. But for anyone who believes that people still have a role in the buying and selling of ads, it's a better place to be than Yahoo.

If you didn't believe our report that TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is in bed with MySpace's top flack, Dani Dudeck, read the obsessive startup blogger's latest story on MySpace Music, which claims that MySpace has "streamed" 1 billion songs. Considering that most MySpace profiles are set to start playing a song, whether you like it or not, as soon as you visit them, that's not that impressive. Arrington leads his story by comparing MySpace streams to iTunes sales, and then acknowledges it's not a "fair comparison." His readers, in the comments, went much further, citing our report and questioning whether the affair with Dudeck clouded Arrington's judgment. Those comments have been — what's the word? — unpublished.

It's only a matter of a few hundred dollars, but after high acquisitive LiveUniverse acquired affiliate movie marketer Peerflix, blogger Eric D. Snider stopped receiving the until-then-regular checks. Which happened around the exact same time that we got a tip — in late August — that LiveUniverse didn't have enough cash to pay employees on payday. And it's just the latest in a string of bad signs.Besides Peerflix, the company started by jilted MySpacer Brad Greenspan has also purchased struggling companies PageFlakes and Revver in the last year, and Greenspan made a personal investment in Flurl, but was turned away by JumpTV. All that wheeling and dealing while not paying attention to basic operations like payroll? Flashy products and technology that may or may not actually exist? "Out of touch" sounds about right. Greenspan and friends will probably just blame the market as management shorts employees, since that's all the rage these days. But this looks a lot like a textbook case of "excess and lack of self-discipline" to me. Who may end up the winner in all this? The Hollywood Hills Cat Burglar, who seems to have gotten away from Greenspan's mess just in time. (Photo by Getty/Alberto E. Rodriguez)

Congress has passed a bill compelling registered sex offenders to submit "email addresses, instant message addresses and other identifying Internet information" to law enforcement. The legislation is sponsored by John McCain, who is not uncoincidentally running for president. The bill, which has passed both houses of Congress and is expected to be signed into law by Bush, aims to protect children from sexual advances on social network sites. Facebook, MySpace, and others are meant to cross-check their user databases with the federal list, and, in the parlance of these types of laws, "delete online predators." But these bills are so broken from the start: what's to keep a past sex offender from just using multiple online identities? Oh, and then there's that whole sticky issue of protecting freedom of speech for those who've served their criminal sentences. Courts in Utah — yes, that Utah — have just ruled on that, providing bad news for those who supported the McCain bill.After a challenge to a similar state law in Utah last week, a federal judge restored a sex offender's right to anonymous speech online. Though the judge stated that this decision should not apply unilaterally to all registered sex offenders, her ruling is the first to question the conventional wisdom: that curbing online speech can curb sex crimes. Free speech advocates and social network analysts have long been claiming that this approach won't work. First, there's the problem of the expansive definition of "sex crime" — from violent assault to public nudity. On that basis, Flickr has at least one employee who, after bending over bare-assed for his colleagues, could be banned from the Internet. Add to that that state and Federal lawmakers still can't seem to grasp the qualitative difference between a sixteen year old flashing her boycrush and a fifty year old posing as the same sixteen year old. Toss with a little bit of election-year mania about being tough on crime, and you get a botched bill that may only drive sex offenders further from the public eye — the opposite of the safer, happier Internet McCain hoped to create. (Photo by soggydan)

We know what TechCrunch's Michael Arrington got out of sleeping with MySpace PR executive Dani Dudeck: Screenshots of MySpace Music before the service launched. But what was Dudeck's quid to Arrington's quo? To find that, it's worth examining all the nice things Arrington has posted about her employer over the past couple of months.On MySpace's Data Availability, a feature which lets MySpace users link their profiles to other services like Twitter, versus Google's similar Friend Connect, he wrote:

Poor Lindsay. She finally just admitted to her relationship with Samantha Ronson, she has a meaty cameo in the in the season premiere of Ugly Betty tonight, and she even reportedly booked a gig as the guest judge for the premiere of Project Runway when it moves to Lifetime. Things were going so well. Not Mean Girls well, or even I Know Who Killed Me well, but about as good as they’ve been for her in months. And then along comes Star Magazine to burst her happy little bubble. That’s right, the tabloid is reporting that Lindsay is “on the fast track to another drug and alcohol-driven breakdown.”Though she’s only been out of rehab for a year, insiders are claiming that “Lindsay's been drinking, doing cocaine and causing all-around mayhem for the past few months…. She quit going to Alcoholics Anonymous and has absolutely never taken recovery seriously. She's gotten progressively worse, and everyone in her life is really scared." Even worse, she showed up at the VMA’s with red scratches all over her arm, leading people to fear she’s started cutting herself again. If you’ll recall, the last time she did that was back in 2006 when she claimed she’d hit “rock bottom.” Of course, Lindsay’s MySpace blog tells a different story. In an entry dated September 19th, the starlet writes (without using capital letters, just like e.e. cummings):

MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe wanted a one-stop music shop that would have included event ticket and merchandise purchases along with streaming audio and paid downloads. What he got were agreements from the four major labels for the streaming audio and a deal with Amazon to sell digital downloads. Which is something. Also, there's handful of big-name sponsors like McDonald's and Toyota, and MySpace certainly still has a huge user base of music lovers. Whether or not this is "the one" for the record industry remains to be seen. How's the service?Of course, it's highly-compressed digital audio, and therefore pretty crappy. But I have to admit, the offerings go well beyond the pop selected for the Jonas Brothers' playlist — while I'm sure the cashiers at Amoeba Records might still sneer at the selection's depth, my searches for everything from Os Mutantes to Gas Huffer, Blind Willie McTell to Mongo Santamaria came up with multiple tracks to choose from. Eventually. The site is currently running incredibly slow, which may be a good sign of interest or a critical fumble of the launch. Users frustrated in the process of creating playlists might just go back to Last.fm, Imeem, iTunes or any of a number of other places to preview and purchase tracks.