Already dominated by the likes of Perez Hilton, Popsugar, and the AOL-owned TMZ.com, celebrity gossip is a niche of the Web that some might say doesn't need another outlet. But Celebuzz general manager Karina Kogan told CNET News.com that it doesn't matter. Research showed that celebrity gossip fans are more than happy to use "more than one source to get the same exact story. They're interested in different points of view, and frankly, they're happy to look at the same photo ten times, just in different settings."

She also asserted that Celebuzz offers something new. "There is no community dedicated to celebrity out there," Kogan said. "There are news aggregators, there are blogs, but there is no community for the celebrity fans."

Buzznet has recently been on an acquisition spree, buying noted music blogs Stereogum and Idolator for its music community, and securing strategic partnerships with existing celebrity blogs Just Jared and A Socialite's Life.

Celebuzz will feature content from both its own editorial team and celebrity bloggers, photo and news agencies, pop culture experts, celebrities themselves, and users of the site.

The blog will offer a fresh perspective and will include quotes, the candidate's schedule and photos not available anywhere else. As a part of our continual effort to reach voters, allow unprecedented access and bring greater transparency to American politics, our blog 'The McCain Report' will provide a sounding board for all.

Almost 80% of social networking site users would be more careful about the details they put online if they knew the media might use them, a poll says.

The Press Complaints Commission said 89% of the 1,000 people polled wanted guidelines on what the media could use.

And 42% of 16 to 24-year-old who used such websites said they knew someone who had been embarrassed by material which was posted without consent.

The PCC is opening talks on how it should respond to the issue.

The poll also found 49% of respondents said it was wrong for the media to use information they had posted on line without asking the consent of the person concerned.

And 58% were fairly or very concerned about the lack of control about how they were depicted on websites.

And of social networking site members, 55% considered whether personal details such as photos might be used by someone else without their consent, before posting them online.

Sir Christopher said the PCC's current code of practice would be able to handle complaints about media outlets using material skimmed from networking sites.

We originally heard that The Rising is being created in partnership with Windsor Media, Terry Semel's investment firm, but we still haven't gotten confirmation of their involvement. Windsor was created by Semel before he went to Yahoo, was put on hold during his tenure there, and fired up again after his departure last year.

The Rising will have original video content with a permanent host in addition to the social network where users can share stories and experiences, tapping into serious demand for this kind of thing. There are thousands of forums dedicated to paranormal and UFO topics today - among them is, yes, a Meetup site for ghost trackers.

It's like the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.'s MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that they have formed the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit group to support the OpenSocial initiative that Google kick-started last year as a way to promote a universal standard for developer applications on social-networking sites.

The specific purpose of the new non-profit, according to a release, is "to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web." It's a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasize that OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View project.

"OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said in a joint statement from the three companies. "The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open."

And Facebook won't be joining the OpenSocial Foundation, either. "As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation," a statement from the company read. "The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience."

Bigger than the forming of the Foundation is the news that Yahoo has joined in on OpenSocial. For a reminder of who else is in, here's a shortened list: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. So, basically, out of all the social networks and web giants on the web, Facebook is the only one that's out of the loop - for now.

With a total membership of more than 40 million worldwide, Bebo is a global social media network which combines community, self-expression and entertainment to enable its users to consume, create, discover and share content. Bebo is one of the leading social networks in the UK, and is ranked number one in Ireland and New Zealand, and number three in the U.S. Its users are heavily engaged and view an average of 78 pages per usage day. Bebo has approximately 100 employees operating in offices in the UK, San Francisco and Austin, TX.

The deal comes just one week after AOL's launch of Open AIM 2.0, an initiative that allows the developer community greater freedom to access the AIM network and integrate AIM into its sites and applications, and the announcement by Apple of a downloadable AIM application for the iPhone.

Under the terms of the agreement, AOL will acquire Bebo for $850 million in cash.

"Bebo is the perfect complement to AOL's personal communications network and puts us in a leading position in social media," said Randy Falco, Chairman and CEO, AOL. "What drew us to Bebo was its substantial and fast-growing worldwide user-base, its vision of a truly social web, and the monetization opportunities that leverage Platform-A across our combined global audience. This positions us to offer advertisers even greater reach and marketers significant insights into the desires and needs of consumers."

"AOL understands the shifting dynamics of the Web and has clearly demonstrated its commitment to leveraging the ever-increasing power of social networks," said Bebo President, Joanna Shields. "With one and the same vision in this area, it was a natural progression for Bebo to join AOL, and we look forward to working together to continue to expand the online social experience globally."

As for the rest of the field, AOL's purchase of Bebo is likely to set off a round of consolidation among smaller players that would be fine tuck-in deals in a larger setting.

With Bebo off the table sites like Ning and LinkedIn have just become more valuable-especially to a company like Yahoo, which appears to be left out of the social networking party.

Across the country, Facebook users are contemplating similar questions when they log onto their accounts. More and more moms and dads are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their sons and daughters, they're friending their sons' and daughters' friends.

Some, like Matt, take the requests in stride. He ultimately friended his dad. Others are less sanguine, voicing their dismay via online groups that decry parental intrusion and offer tips on how to screen out mom and dad. ("Just go onto their computers and delete their accounts." "Just don't add them as a friend or any1 that is a co-worker with ur parents duh.") Even parenting experts are getting involved, offering their own tips on proper Facebook etiquette.

"I do not know if this has happened to anybody, but this morning I log on to Facebook and I have a new friend request!" wrote 19-year-old Mike Yeamans, a sophomore at James Madison University, on one of several "No Parents on Facebook" groups that have popped up on the site. "I am excited to make a new friend so I click on the link. I could not believe what I saw. My father! This is an outrage!"

Hollywood super producer Steven Spielberg is preparing to launch a new social network, we've heard from multiple sources. The focus will be on users who've had or who are interested in sharing paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences. The new social network may also have original video content investigating alleged ghost and UFO stories.

Spielberg has apparently had at least one paranormal experience himself. There are stories of him staying in a hotel called Excelsior House and being so frightened by ghosts that he fled the room and moved 20 miles away. We've also heard anecdotes about Spielberg seeing the ghost of a dead relative repeatedly as a child. Whether based in reality or the product of an exceptional imagination, these experiences may have had an impact on his life's work and this upcoming social network.

It's inevitable that the explosive expansion that Facebook experienced in 2007 can't possibly go on forever. And since no hot new destination has popped up to potentially suck away Facebook traffic, the obvious conclusion is to blame it on social-networking fatigue. Facebook, one could say, is a trend and users have simply grown tired of it.

The argument makes sense. For many there was an initial novelty to keeping in touch with faraway friends and classmates, wasting time at the office with games and other developer-created applications, and voyeuristically sifting through online photo albums all on a single destination site. Me, I've grown tired of the Scrabulous gaming application on Facebook--it's way more fun to play word games in person.

But an apparent leveling in traffic doesn't equal mass account deletion. "Coolness factor" always fades; now it's up to Facebook to prove it can stay relevant and useful in its post-expansion era. Remember when instant-messaging client adoption was soaring and people were IMing each other just for the heck of it? We're all still IMing, but it's no longer a novelty, it's a utility. ("Utility," by the way, appears to be one of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's favorite words.)

Syrian users of Facebook said on Friday the authorities had blocked access to the social network Web site as part of a crackdown on political activism on the Internet.

"Facebook helped further civil society in Syria and form civic groups outside government control. This is why it has been banned," women's rights advocate Dania al-Sharif told Reuters.

"They cut off communications between us and the outside world. We are used to this behavior from our government," said Mais al-Sharbaji, who set up a Facebook group for amateur Syrian photographers.

There was no comment form the government, which has intensified a campaign against bloggers, virtual opinion forums and independent media sites in recent months.

The two companies said on Wednesday that Microsoft would invest $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. The investment values the three-year-old Facebook, which will bring in about $150 million in revenue this year, at $15 billion.

The deal ends two months of jockeying between three major Internet players for the right to invest in and forge close ties with Facebook.

As part of the deal, Microsoft will sell the banner ads appearing on Facebook outside of the United States, splitting the revenue with it. Last year, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to run banner ads on the site in the United States through 2011.

The astronomical valuation for Facebook is evidence that Microsoft executives believed they could not afford to lose out on the deal. Google appears to be building a dominant position in the race to serve advertisements online. Fearing it might lose control over the next generation of computer users, Microsoft has been trying to match and in some cases block Google's plans, even if that effort is costly.

The move brings the website into line with rival Facebook, which has seen strong growth since it opened up to outside programmers.

Facebook has become a portal for services such as video, audio and photos since the change.

MySpace has more than 188 million registered users, compared to the 47 million who use Facebook.

MySpace was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for $580m in 2005.

"We hoped it would do very well, but we never imagined it would do this well," Mr Murdoch told the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Martha Stewart, the paragon of expertise as content, is adopting the style of social media for her next website -- to be called "Marthapedia." But Ms. Stewart, who didn't get where she is by suggesting that the hoi polloi know more than she does, made clear that Marthapedia will not be so freewheeling as, say, Wikipedia. Editors at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will check to see if the public's ideas are better than their own, she said.

The site initially will be seeded with existing content from Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, such as Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook, but will open for information and suggestions from the public, Ms. Stewart told an Advertising Week audience this morning. "It will be a very interesting site," she said.

However, before we could add photos to the site, we had to give considerable thought to the best way to integrate photos into a professional site. Privacy is an incredibly important issue to us, and we wanted to make sure we had the right controls in place. As a result, all members will have the option to control whether their photo is visible to their connections, their network, or everyone.

We know that people take their professional reputations seriously, and as a result we expect LinkedIn profile photos to be professional in nature. However, we also hope that the wisdom of the millions of LinkedIn users will help us identify photos that violate that. Similar to LinkedIn Answers, members will be able to quickly and easily flag photos that violate policy for review.

Mass High Tech reports the Charlestown, Mass.-based startup, which was launched by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, recently laid off 24 employees or approximately 35 percent of the staff prior to the restructuring.

MHT said the layoffs included some members of the executive team, but the company did not disclose specific names.

Eons, which has the slogan "Loving life on the flip side of 50," will focus on social networking going forward.

If you thought the news feed was a threat to your privacy, be warned: Facebook is announcing Public Search Listings today, meaning profiles will be searchable through Facebook, and soon turn up on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.

As of tomorrow, search will be available through Facebook; users will then have one month to change their privacy settings before profiles get indexed by the major search engines. These results will include, at most, your name and profile picture.

Obviously that's a move that could scare some users, and there are some restrictions: you must have your profile set to viewable by "everyone" in order to appear, and only your limited profile will be public.

As housing officials at colleges around the country send out roommate assignments to freshmen this summer, a growing number of schools say they're getting more requests for changes - from parents who don't like the roommates' Facebook profiles.

"They were getting an impression - false or accurate - of what the student would be like to live with," says Magda Manetas of The College of New Jersey in Ewing.

About a dozen other colleges contacted by USA TODAY report similar complaints. And this may be just the beginning: Some schools already have mailed roommate assignments for fall, but many more say they will be sending them out in the next few weeks.

Housing officials say parents who cite Facebook most frequently mention party-related content and photos as their primary concerns. Parents sometimes see cups in photos and make the leap to alcohol and drugs, Manetas says.

But Robin Berkowitz-Smith of Syracuse University says race, religion and sexual orientation are the top three concerns from parents contacting officials there.

Respectance, which is unique among social networks since it's dedicated to remembering those who have died, has taken $1.5 million in a series A funding in a round led by Solid Ventures and Big Bang Ventures. The site also launches officially today, and says it has taken funding at a "pre-user" stage.

With the MySpace, Bebo and Facebook pages of the dead already becoming shrines of a type - with friends leaving comments for the deceased - it's an idea that may generate interest.

The social networking website MySpace has reported a four-fold increase in the number of convicted sex offenders using its service.

The company found more than 29,000 convicted sex offenders in the United States had profiles on MySpace - up from a figure of 7,000 given in May.

MySpace said it was pleased it had identified and removed the profiles of the offenders.

Critics of MySpace call for new laws to make such sites safer for children.

In a way, Zillow is attempting to combine its real estate data with the citizen journalism movement, encouraging people who live in select neighborhoods to upload photos, events, news and other information.

The idea is that people will not only visit Zillow to learn about homes, but -- one could imagine -- local restaurants, recent crimes or the history of the neighborhood. With this feature, you could also see Zillow moving down the path of trying to link people together in certain neighborhoods to share a lawnmower, sell a grill, host a fundraiser or, perhaps, find a date. And if that occurs, the real estate information and Zestimates offered by Zillow today might just be a Trojan horse into other lucrative advertising markets.

You can think of it as TV on Cliff's Notes. Each 'minisode' is three to five minutes long, but Sony and MySpace have assured skeptical viewers that the story arc of the original TV episode remains intact.

On the Minisode Network, you can now watch three shaved-down episodes from a total of 15 TV shows. Many of them, like Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels, predate the average young MySpace user, but a few, like Dilbert, are a bit newer. According to a release from MySpace, new ones will be added each week and more than 500 total will be online by the end of 2007. It's not clear whether this means that new shows will be added as well or if the 'minisodes' will remain restricted to the current 15.

Fans of MySpace and Facebook are divided by much more than which music they like, suggests a study.

A six-month research project has revealed a sharp division along class lines among the American teenagers flocking to the social network sites.

The research suggests those using Facebook come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.

By contrast, MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education.

The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.

MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks, freaks, or queers.

Most teens who exclusively use Facebook are familiar with and have an opinion about MySpace. These teens are very aware of MySpace and they often have a negative opinion about it. They see it as gaudy, immature, and "so middle school." They prefer the "clean" look of Facebook, noting that it is more mature and that MySpace is "so lame." What hegemonic teens call gaudy can also be labeled as "glitzy" or "bling" or "fly" (or what my generation would call "phat") by subaltern teens. Terms like "bling" come out of hip-hop culture where showy, sparkly, brash visual displays are acceptable and valued. The look and feel of MySpace resonates far better with subaltern communities than it does with the upwardly mobile hegemonic teens. This is even clear in the blogosphere where people talk about how gauche MySpace is while commending Facebook on its aesthetics. I'm sure that a visual analyst would be able to explain how classed aesthetics are, but aesthetics are more than simply the "eye of the beholder" - they are culturally narrated and replicated. That "clean" or "modern" look of Facebook is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house (that I admit I'm drawn to) while the more flashy look of MySpace resembles the Las Vegas imagery that attracts millions every year. I suspect that lifestyles have aesthetic values and that these are being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook.

Stealing some of his material from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on the matter, Nye said people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life. The argument, self serving as it is, makes a certain amount of sense. Not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon.

After the inevitable social net shakeout, Nye says, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, in the Nye/Hoffman scenario, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking - serving as a "productivity tool," used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice.

Granted, LinkedIn's current growth does look promising. With upwards of 11 million members already signed up, the site is now adding 180,000 new members each week, and fully half of these live outside the United States. Thus, Nye professes little fear of would be competitors like the European front-runner Xing.com. "We are clearly going to win the English speaking world and adjacent economies," he said. "And that already is pretty meaningful." In Silicon Valley, he added, "LinkedIn is now so prevalent that you sort of have to join it."

The firm's president and CEO Leslie Moonves said: "Last.fm is one of the fastest growing online communities out there."

He said Last.fm's strength in building communities around music and syndicating content was "central to CBS".

He added: "Their demographics also play perfectly to CBS's goal to attract younger viewers and listeners across our businesses."

Our goal is to provide you with a home base on the site, a page where you'll be able to both share and track your thoughts over time. When you post a comment to an article or discussion group, you'll be able to get to your MyPost page by clicking on your MyPost ID just above the comment or by clicking on your ID where it appears in the top left corner of the washingtonpost.com home page.

Other readers will be able to browse to your MyPost page from your comments and, once there, view what you've had to say or ask to message you by sending a "friend request". You'll see those requests on your page -- they won't be visible to others -- and may choose to accept them, turn them down or ignore them.

You'll be able to exchange messages with readers you've accepted as "friends" on the site, and those messages will appear on your page. By default, only you and your friends will be able to see them, although you can open them up to any site visitor by changing the settings in the Profile section of your page. You can also tell others about yourself in your Profile by uploading a photo or filling in a brief bio.

MyPost isn't intended to be MySpace or another general social networking site, but a feature that will make washingtonpost.com more useful to you and others. We'll be adding features to MyPost over the next few months and hope you'll email us with your comments and suggestions.