It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

Sources said MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston.

In June, Time Warner online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media, a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics.

Read More »

Today, the news was the worst possible for Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Hudson, an impossibly talented and obviously lovely singer and actress, and her sister, after the body of her seven-year-old nephew was found after an intense search of the Chicago area.

Hudson used her MySpace page to encourage fans to help in the now tragically-ended search for the boy, and news stories broke all day long. Her mother and brother were also found murdered in their home several days ago.

No surprise, Internet video is popping up all over, many in the form of condolences to Hudson in the form of songs and music mashups.

Read More »

You might have missed this story from The Wall Street Journal over the weekend by William M. Bulkeley about criminals who are getting hoisted on their own digital petard.

Literally, in fact, by taking pictures of their crimes on devices like cellphones and even posting them on the Web, thus proving their guilt. Apparently, you can [...]

Read More »