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Which business model is likely to be the most successful: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook or Second Life?

According to a war game played out at London's Business School last week, MySpace wins. But, in a conclusion that was validated by this week's Viacom lawsuit against Google and YouTube for copyright infringement, the participants concluded that both MySpace and YouTube are vulnerable to legal attacks and government regulations that target illegal activities and objectionable content, like child pedophilia and pornography.

Copyright lawsuits will be a "major distraction at best or they could undermine" the businesses, says Leonard Fuld, … Read more

Surfing Google's Blogger Web site is dangerous, warns Fortinet. Several of the blogs on the site have been taken over by miscreants and redirect to phishing Web sites or try to load malicious software onto PCs, the security firm said in an alert Wednesday.

In one example a Blogger blog redirects to what appears to be an online pharmacy, but is in fact a site hosted in China that's part of a scam to trick people into giving up personal details and financial information, Fortinet said.

In another example, a blog site that appears to belong to a … Read more

Web search company Ask.com has secretly launched a guerrilla marketing campaign in the United Kingdom in an effort to boost its profile in a land dominated by Google users. Posters with a hand holding a megaphone and urging people to "Stop the Online Information Monopoly" recently began appearing in London underground trains and stations. See a photo on Valleywag, which first reported on the ads.

Ask's name is not on the posters, but the company plans to reveal that it is behind the ads by disclosing that on the Web site listed on the posters on … Read more

If you have ever driven below 14th Street in Manhattan, anywhere in Boston or in the old cities of Europe, you are probably very aware that maps are only clues to finding your destination, not directions.

Roads descended from wagon trails can often be hidden down alleys, unexpectedly become one-ways, meander indiscriminately and start up again one block over from where they paused.

For this reason, many people direct by landmark, with street names in parentheses. And good luck if you are getting your directions from a non-human.

Google is adding photos to its Google Maps local search and Google Maps … Read more

Google has announced on their blog a new partnership with BMW's Assist driving service--but only in Germany, so far. BMW drivers using Google Maps Deutschland can now "send" selected geographic data from their PCs directly to their in-car navigators. Consequently, there's no need to look it up at home and then look it up again in the car.

It's not available stateside yet, or with non-BMW navigators, but Google has stressed that this is only the first step in the introduction of the "Send to Car" feature. Meanwhile, Google Maps aficionados in the … Read more

Once again, copyright holders are trying to unmask who uploaded a potentially infringing video clip to YouTube.

This time it's Magnolia Pictures, a film distributor owned by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, the billionaire co-founders of Broadcast.com. Magnolia released the Academy Award-nominated documentary Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, which has a bad habit of appearing on video-sharing sites.

Hence the subpoena to Google, which a federal court in Texas issued on Tuesday. It asks for information on how to identify the person who uploaded three videos (two on Google Video and one on YouTube).

On YouTube, at … Read more

Google released Google Desktop 5 on Tuesday, an update to its application for searching and indexing files on a personal computer or shared networked computers.

Google Desktop 5, available immediately for free download, offers a new sidebar interface for gadgets, new gadgets, a tool for searching available gadgets, a preview tool for browsing Google Desktop Search results, and new security features.

Google gadgets, similar to Apple's widgets, offer mini-applications for scouring the Internet for e-mail, news, weather and photos, as well as offer tools like clocks, calendars and notes.

Google Desktop 5 includes a sidebar for managing these gadgets … Read more

India, Russia and China were the countries with the biggest increases in Internet users over the past year, according to a study released on Tuesday by comScore Networks.

The number of unique Internet users 15 years or older rose 33 percent in India to 21.1 million, 21 percent in Russia to 12.7 million and 20 percent in China to 86.8 million, according to the study. China has the second largest Internet population in the world, after the United States. The number of Internet users 15 years or older in the U.S. was 153.4 million users, … Read more

Google plans to digitize more than a million public-domain books in the Bavarian State Library, according to a Tuesday blog posting of Jens Redmer, head of Google Book Search in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The effort, which is set to include works by The Brothers Grimm, Goethe and Schiller, is part of Google's Library Project of scanning, indexing and making available for viewing over the Internet entire libraries of books. In addition to the German-language books, the Bavarian State Library has out-of-copyright works in French, Spanish, Latin, Italian and English.

Other libraries participating in Google's book-scanning … Read more