Ad Age says that Lloyd Braun, the former chief of ABC Entertainment, has been at Yahoo! for a year now, but some of his ideas have yet to bear fruit. Content on the Yahoo! site is actually quite good--its news service reels in a great deal of traffic--but most of it comes from other sources like AP, Reuters, or blogs like Gawker.com. Braun's department has hired well-known financial journalists for Yahoo! Finance news, and is continuing to build up other areas as well, but in travel and foreign correspondent offerings, two areas where Yahoo! expected to deliver the next generation …

Biz360 and Feedster have unveiled a new service called BlogView that helps marketers track buzz about their company, products, and competitors on blogs and wiki boards. Biz360 currently tracks over 15 million sources through Feedster, which the companies say is able to separate real blogs from fake content sites. Biz360's software also automatically identifies and adds new blog sources from the Web.

Plastic toys don't mean much to kids these days, but media files do, or so goes the logic behind a pending patent application by the Walt Disney Company. According to The New York Times, the patent actually involves fast food chain McDonald's, which tries to entice kids with plastic toys inside Happy Meals. With Disney's idea, a consumer would enter a restaurant, order food, and receive a portable media player along with an electronic code authorizing the partial download of a movie, video or other media file. It's unclear whether the device would belong to the restaurant or the consumer, …

Over the weekend, America Online founder Steve Case made his case for splitting up the slow and lumbering Time Warner, Inc. in an editorial published in the Washington Post. Case noted that while the Time Warner-AOL merger was designed to speed up the transition of AOL's dial-up business to broadband, thereby bringing Time Warner's content to the Web, largely the opposite occurred, as both AOL and Time Warner started slowing each other down. As pure-play companies like Yahoo! and Google have zoomed past Time Warner and AOL, Case, like the investor Carl Icahn, feels the company should be split …

Following Carl Icahn's demands that Time Warner be broken up and Steve Case's Washington Post column of a similar nature, The New York Times takes stock of the situation, noting that despite the media attention, the campaign against the media giant still doesn't hold much weight. To say the least, the sniping between Time Warner Chief Dick Parsons and Carl Icahn, the proxy battle specialist, has become unsavory, and the mud slinging may not help Icahn, who owns 3 percent of the company. Icahn's mission is to get the Time Warner board to support his cause at the company's …

Instead of shying away from the digital book revolution, News Corp. publisher HarperCollins, for one, is embracing it. The company today is announcing it will make its books available to the search services offered by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.com, while maintaining possession of the digital files themselves. By owning its digital files, Google and company will have to come to HarperCollins for access to its backlist of 20,000 titles. These titles will be hosted on HarperCollins' internal server, so that search engines will have to ping the server for page views instead of copying and then hosting them …

Dutch company Royal Philips Electronics plans to bring its mobile TV chipset to the U.S. next year, which would allow American consumers to watch full TV programs on their cell phones, as viewers already do in Japan and Korea. Cnet reports that the company plans to unveil its technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Jan. 5. Royal Philips already announced similar plans for Europe, which it expects to be ready in time for the FIFA World Cup that starts next June.

Meanwhile, telecom company Sprint Nextel today is unveiling a similar feature for its mobile video users that will let them watch full-length movies, as well as TV programs, Reuters reports. For an additional $6.95 per month, Sprint mobile users will be able to watch unlimited TV programs and movies. While this sounds great--and one day it really could be--there are only four movies on offer so far. The main obstacle to the emergence of quality mobile TV is going to be securing the rights to quality content from producers, distributors and movie studios. However, Sprint says it plans to announce …

A Dow Jones report says advertisers welcome the possibility of a Microsoft-America Online advertising pact, but a deal is unlikely to have an effect on their spending. However, a deal between Microsoft and AOL would have a significant effect on the search advertising business currently dominated by Google. Google, which also powers AOL's search services, accounts for 45 percent of Internet searches, compared to Yahoo's 23 percent, and Microsoft's 12 percent. An AOL-Microsoft deal would certainly enhance competition in this market, and in online advertising overall, the advertisers said. In the last few weeks, the AOL negotiations have been overshadowed …

Next year's world soccer tournament, the FIFA World Cup, is a huge advertising event, causing both Yahoo! and MSN to launch content and advertising opportunities in the six-month run-up to the world's biggest sporting event. For the second time, Yahoo! will be chief sponsor and host of the tournament's official Web site. Yahoo! is also one of 15 official worldwide partners for FIFA, which is soccer's Swiss-based world governing body. Others are adidas, Anheuser-Busch, Avaya, Coca-Cola, Continental Airlines, Deutsche Telekom, Emirates Airline, Fujifilm, Gillette, Hyundai, MasterCard, McDonald's, Philips, and Toshiba. The online media giant has done the honors for four …