MySpace.com's new parent

MySpace, one of teenagers' favorite blogging services, is going corporate. News Corp., which is acquiring MySpace's parent, Intermix, will be folding the service "into its newly formed Fox Interactive Media unit," MarketWatch reports. "If next-generation media is about user-generated content, then MySpace.com may be the perfect centerpiece for tomorrow's media conglomerates. At least that seems to be the thinking behind News Corp.'s $580 million cash purchase of Intermix," according to another MarketWatch report. MySpace, the most prominent of Intermix's 30-odd Web sites, says it gets about 2 million registered users a month, and it targets 16-to-34-year-olds. What this may eventually mean to online families is better privacy protection for the underage segment of that target market - MySpace may eventually look more like MSN Spaces, AOL's RED Blogs, or Yahoo 360 in offering levels of privacy (for more on this, see "Do young bloggers care about privacy?" and this on RED Blogs).

Let's hope Xanga.com, also very popular among teens, somehow becomes more accountable. One family recently emailed me about how they'd tried to contact Xanga about getting some personal info removed from their 7th-grader's blog and simply couldn't get a response. Here's a recent thoughtful article in the York [Penn.] Daily Record on teen blogs.