Once again, the internet is causing humanity to be beaten up. A high school (on Long Island, strangely enough) organized its five-year reunion using dangerous internet site Facebook. But when Adam Lynn, a derivative trader (ha) from Hoboken (ha) arrived at the bar where it was being held, he was attacked by two of his fellow classmates! The dispute was traced back to "a hotly contested gym-class handball game during their junior year." When will the internet stop being so dangerous that the press has to issue ominous warnings whenever anything vaguely internet-related happens? It's not just this latest "PUNCH IN 'FACE BOOK,'" as the Post eloquently puts it. The media has been warning us of internet dangers forever!

Two weeks after News Corp COO Peter Chernin told an audience in New York that MySpace ads are ahead of target, the site launched a self-serve ad system at advertising.myspace.com. Aimed primarily at musicians and small businesses, the ads start at a $25 minimum for a campaign. The big difference from Google's AdWords: MySpace ads only link to other MySpace pages. Here's a summary of Mashable's writeup on the system:

Nutty and strangely adorable Courtney Love has job opportunities for you! First, she's seeking someone honest to clean up after her. "i need a non thieving non freaky housekeeper," she writes on her MySpace page. But the candidate doesn't have to be entirely "non freaky" she clarifies: "is anyone insanely clean neatfreak near malibu?" But if cleaning isn't your specialty, how are you with a camera? "also i need we need a documentarist, someone to document our studio as we go in wedsday, and i have ALOT of work to do til then and i wont just hand this to hbo or bbc 2 or bravo and god forbid not vh1! A DOCUMENATRY NOT A REALITY SHOW. get in touch with jason whp will further put you in touch with jason wienberg at untitled." The full ad after the jump.

Diablo Cody—the hippest, be-boppingest, most linguistically dexterous screenwriter in Hollywood—has finally gotten mad. The woman responsible for the twee little indie sensation Juno has always presented a cool cucumber, just-like-you, Hollywood "outsider" vibe, to the delight of some and the annoyance of others. She's from Minnesota! She's a former stripper! She didn't go to no fancy film school. It all seems a bit synthetic, honestly, which is why it's funny/sad to see her snap. She's chosen to publicly rail against the myraid internet haters who apparently spend their days knitting her doom, and she's doing it on MySpace, of course. She even manages to throw an "I have an Oscar and you don't" brag in for good measure. Though heck I'd brag too if I pulled off such a spectacular heist, and been praised for a silly and indulgent acceptance speech to boot. Read the full rant, via SlashFilm, after the jump.

Embarrassingly, MySpace unveiled its plans for MySpace Music without a CEO in place. The store's set to open later this month, but who will mind it? The Los Angeles Times suggests the shortlist is down to two names: Owen Van Natta, Facebook's former COO (left), and Andy Schuon, a longtime Universal Music executive (right). TechCrunch says Van Natta is a "top contender." Insiders say MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is wooing him even more aggressively than Paris Hilton.Van Natta is well qualified, and the job involves partnerships and business development, two areas where he's especially skilled. And he's long said he wants a CEO job at a consumer Internet company, but I'm skeptical he'll take the gig. He strikes me as too independent to answer to meddling MySpacers and hidebound music-industry executives. He also likes to be involved in the product, and it sounds like MySpace Music is mostly developed already. Schuon seems a more likely candidate. His main qualification: He previously ran Pressplay, an online music-industry joint venture. That's also the main strike against him, since Pressplay was a huge flop.

MySpace Music, a joint venture between the News Corp. social network and music labels Universal, Sony and Warner,finally launches next week, says Fortune, though it still won't have a CEO. MySpace users will be able to listen to and organize playlists full of songs from all three music labels for free. (EMI is the lone holdout, which means no coldplay.) Playlists will include affiliate links to Amazon.com's MP3 store. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe says ad revenues and song kickbacks are going to save the music industry, replacing lost CD sales.Imeem CEO Dalton Caldwell, whose company already offers a similar product,

You'll be able to hit Tila Tequila from your Bold starting next month, says BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. I found this one-paragraph writeup hiding in a long News.com post on today's doings at CTIA in San Francisco:

News Corp. COO Peter Chernin told Wall Street investors yesterday that social network MySpace is selling ads "above where we expected" and better than the rest of the marketplace. Which is funny, because a Madison Avenue's interactive ad agency exec was just telling me the other day that "you buy MySpace only if you have to. If there's an alternative, go for it." There are three reasons why.

Why doesn't News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch just make it official? His wife, Wendi Deng, serves as "chief strategist" for MySpace China, the media conglomerate's Internet outpost in her homeland. MySpace China CEO Luo Chan has just quit. Just promote her already, Rupert! You're not going to have any luck recruiting an outsider to fill the spot, when it's obvious Deng runs the show. And you'll never hear the end of it from her until you do. (If you're not familiar with Deng's colorful history before she married Murdoch, you should read up on it, courtesy of a pre-Murdoch Wall Street Journal article.)

What did Microsoft get when it signed a deal in August to serve ads against search results on Facebook? The right to make money off the second-fastest growing search engine on the Internet, according to a ComScore study. Facebook served 173 million search queries in July 2008, up 10 percent from 157 million in July 2007. Facebook doesn't allow its users to search the rest of Web from its site. Even then, its search engine reached a sixth the size of Microsoft's own.A dandy of a deal for Microsoft? Perhaps not. Look closer at ComScore's chart and you'll see that the fastest-growing search engine is MySpace, which gets all of its search ads from Google. Google doesn't make much money from them, though, CEO Eric Schmidt admitted earlier this summer. Probably because no one searches MySpace for something to buy. Will Facebook prove any different?

Employees of Fox Entertainment Group, the News Corp. entity which includes most of the media conglomerates U.S. arms, recently got a peppy letter from septuagenarian CEO Rupert Murdoch and COO Peter Chernin. After lavishing Fox's movie and television units with praise — "record market share," "double digit profit growth," "critically acclaimed releases," Murdoch finishes the letter with this tepid phrase:

Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, or Hollywood-crossover types like Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee turned movie producer. Walt Mossberg, now employed by New Establishment perennial Rupert Murdoch, also squeaked in. The consolation prize Vanity Fair offers: Its "Next Establishment" list, reserved for the likes of Twitter's Ev Williams. It's a marvelous piece of New York media trickery — flatter the geeks by making them feel included, but corral them into a side room so the real power brokers aren't offended by comparison. True, the "Next Establishment" suggests that these are people who might matter in the future. But in saying that, Vanity Fair's editors are also sending the message that right here, right now, its "Next" nominees are nobodies. On this year's list:

"BJ McCombs was severely burned in a fire at the age of 18 months," explains the support group set up on MySpace after the site removed photos McCombs's parents had posted of their late son. BJ's photos had been deleted by MySpace staff after another user reported them as offensive. "You may feel singled out," reads a message from a MySpace representative to McCombs's mother in Sullivan, Indiana. "But be assured we delete each and every one of these images as we locate them." Mrs. McCombs says MySpace threatened to delete her profile if she reposted the pics. Coverage from local media in the Terre Haute area seems to have stayed MySpace from re-removing the photos, now uploaded to the group's pages.

Ow, stop! The candidate's awkward, reading-my-lines intro clip. The front and center posts by a guy whose icon reads "STR8T." His angry typo, "Will Obama ascend from the heavens and bless us all?" Just when we'd forgotten about McCainSpace, they went and revamped it. The effort would've been better spent on more YouTube clips, the one place on the Internet where the White Tornado is beating Barack. Here's McCain's awkward video hello, and a sampler of the senator's supporter-generated videos:Click to view Click to view Click to view Click to view

A miscreant from the sordid 4chan message-board community sent rapper and social media whiz-kid Soulja Boy a text message the other day, telling him to fork over $2,500 if he wanted control over his MySpace account back. "I sent him a text message back," says Soulja Boy in a clip below, " I said fuck you, bitch. Do what you do. This motherfucker got to be fucked up." Then Soulja Boy contacted MySpace and got his account back. Now he's offering fans $10,000 for the name of the hacker. Valleywag commenter Rex Sorgatz suggests a security tip for the young man: "Perhaps his password shouldn't have been SupermanDatHo."

Both top social networks Facebook and MySpace redesigned their sites this summer, but while we prefer the look and feel of Facebook — isn't that nice? — so far only MySpace's redesign has actually earned its company more cash. ComScore reports MySpace served the most ad views on the Web last month. Analyst Rich Greenfield of Pali Research says MySpace was able to charge major brands like Sprint, Verizon and Wendy's more than it used to for many of them.Why? Greenfield says the site's redesign, which put a huge ad space at the top of the site's home page, allows MySpace to "reach far beyond the 'social media' advertising category and to target far larger portal advertising budgets." Wired reports that MySpace also now charges advertisers extra for Friday ads on the homepage, because that's when film companies want to push new movies. Facebook, which has a much cleaner, more user-friendly interface, doesn't allow similar site takeovers and in fact removed homepage banners as part of its redesign. The difference between the sites is simple: MySpace is trying to make a buck, right here, right now — and Facebook wants to find an innovative new advertising product so it can be bigger than Google.

Using social networks to find sex only make kids these days look sluttier. The reality? A new study of 2,000 MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo users aged 16 to 24 finds they're not happy about the reputation. A full 69 percent believe the media portray them unfairly as "sex maniacs." Those surveyed will be happy with the study's results:It shows that, yes, kids today are using posts and pokes to flirt, but they're also using social networking sites to share sex ed with each other. What's not to like about a new generation of honest, well-informed sluts? And with 93 percent using social-network communities regularly, at least they're faithful to the sites that bring them together.

Connected Ventures cofounder Zach Klein — the guy who spread a rumor that the Mormons were trying to buy Facebook — continues his stay in San Francisco. The latest phrase he's learned from the natives: "vesting in peace."

A Fox News exec let it slip that Facebook users are "more sophisticated" than Myspace users. But, honestly, what does that even mean? Today's featured commenter, random_play, explains with SAT-style analogies:

In the tangled web woven by media conglomerates and Web companies, MySpace which is owned by News Corp. under Fox Interactive Media has a partnership with news broadcaster MSNBC — the cable partnership between Microsoft and NBC. Fox News, another News Corp. property and direct MSNBC competitor, has now signed a deal with Facebook, which counts Microsoft as the lead investor. Admitting that Facebook is now leading MySpace in the social networking space, Fox News VP of development Joel Cheatwood told reporter Brian Stelter, "They also have a user that’s a little older and a little more sophisticated." Enough with the diplomatic double-speak, Cheatwood — tell us what you really think.