Madonna Grants Music Rights to Glee: The Material Girl has given the Fox series the rights to her catalog
for an all-Madonna-themed episode in the works for early next year,
according to Entertainment Weekly. [TV Guide]
Time for a Social Networking Shakeout? What's unclear is where social networking goes from here. Experts at Wharton say there's still a lot of growth left in the sector, but a round of consolidation, reinvention and restructuring is likely in the not-too-distant future. [Forbes]
Virtual Goods Sales Could Increase 150%: We have spoken with several casual online game publishers, social networks, and companies that facilitate virtual good transactions in the past week. Based on these conversations, we estimate that virtual goods sales could grow as much as 100% to 150% this year in America and Western Europe. [SAI]
Why Charging for Online Content (Mostly) Won't Work: Content is really good at attracting audiences -- but it's not so great at directly generating revenue through gated-content subscriptions. Sorry, but you just need to get over it. Most people can get most content one way or another and circumventing the gated-content model is not that hard for users. [AdAge]
Yahoo! & WPP Announce Branded Content Partnership: Under this deal GroupM will create the content while Yahoo! will provide the distribution. In some cases this will involve creating micro-sites for the webisodes. [SAI]
Zinkia Takes Pocoyo Online: Aimed primarily at 3 to 8 year olds, the virtual world is currently available in English and Spanish, with other language versions to be rolled out over the coming months. [Global License]
Teens Might Be Surprised by What They Find in the Library: Librarians need to realize and accept that reading is not just limited to books, but includes magazines, graphic novels, social networking and text messaging. They need to expand their view of literature. [Lufkin Daily News]
College Kids Are the Digital Demo: College students are the most connected demographic group in the US. They own multiple electronic devices and are a prime audience for online video. [eMarketer]
New Google Music Service Launch Imminent: Google will soon launch a music service, we’ve heard from multiple sources, and the company has spent the last several weeks securing content for the launch of the service from the major music labels. [TechCrunch]
The Final Word on Social Media ROI: Right now people seem to be fretting far too much over ROI and social media. Right now the camps seem to be polarized and split into two very outspoken groups. [Shuaism]
Louisiana Targets Student-Teacher Communication: Beginning next month, Louisiana public schools will be required to document all electronic communication that occurs between teachers and students. The new law will even require tracking exchanges initiated by students to teachers via personal devices the schools don't own. [eSchool News]
The Making of Zynga's Cafe World: Cafe World has topped 15 million users and it has helped boost Zynga’s presence on Facebook to more than 148 million monthly active users. It’s clear that Zynga is now reaching a mass market through Facebook. [GamesBeat]
What Parents Need to Know About H1N1: There is so much information about this year's flu and H1N1 (Swine Flu) that most parents don't know who to believe. We asked the Infection Control department at Phoenix Children's Hospital to give us the
facts about H1N1. Related: Get H1N1 updates on your mobile phone. [Phoenix Children's Hospital] [Barking Robot]
