Broadcast journalist Charlie Rose this week started a series on the future of journalism, inviting Walter Isaacson of Time, Robert Thomson of The Wall Street Journal, and Mort Zuckerman of the New York Daily News to join him on his show. During the interview, Silicon Valley Watcher's Tom Foremski says the Journal's Thomson said "several interesting things." The most interesting: "Google devalues everything it touches. Google is great for Google but it's terrible for content providers." The problem with Google, Thomson says, is that it doesn't distinguish between the quality of content around which it serves ads. It is merely …

Facebook, it seems, has finally overtaken Google's Blogger to become the top social media site on the Web. According to new data from comScore, the social networking giant had 221 million unique users at the end of December 2008, compared to 225.5 million users for Blogger. Assuming that Blogger's traffic remained flat and Facebook's upward trend continued in January, Facebook should have overtaken Blogger by now. In the category of engagement, both Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace have shown gains over the past year. MySpace actually has a firm lead in that category, growing 15% in January to 266.3 minutes …

The video game biz continues to defy the recession, according to stellar January sales numbers from NPD Group. Both the Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii saw solid year-over-year sales gains of 34% and a whopping 148%, respectively. The only bad news came from Sony, whose PlayStation 3 saw its third consecutive month of lower sales compared to a year earlier. As a whole, the U.S. video games industry saw sales of $1.33 billion in January, up 13% from January 2008. Nintendo sold 679,200 Wiis in January, Microsoft sold 309,000 Xbox 360s and Sony sold 203,200 PS3s. Nintendo leads the next …

Have music-based video games like "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" run their course? Viacom's Sumner Redstone warned that consumers may be growing bored with these games during yesterday's earnings call with reporters, saying that flagging sales of its popular "Rock Band" title dragged down earnings in its video game division. Numbers from NPD Group confirm it: sales of music games are down significantly from the same time last year. As UBS analyst Ben Schachter writes in a research note, when you exclude "Rock Band," Electronic Arts (ERTS) saw sales growth of 21% year-over-year. But when you include Rock Band's 52% …

Google will shut down its radio ad business and lay off as many as 40 workers, saying that the three-year investment simply didn't pay off. The search giant expanded into the radio ad business in 2006 following the $102 million purchase of dMarc Broadcasting. Google is now seeking a buyer for the software that arranges ads on radio programs. According to a company blog post, Google will stop selling terrestrial radio ads by May 31 and focus instead on streaming radio. Last month, the Web giant closed its business that sold ad space on newspapers. Google faced an obstacle, according …

Facebook announced this morning that it's seeking more partnerships with wireless service providers and phone makers like Nokia, Apple, and Research in Motion. The social networking giant already has applications on devices like Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry, but it is now looking to more closely integrate Facebook with these mobile devices. About 13% of Facebook users access the site via their mobile phones. One example of the new features being developed is a tool that allows users to merge their phone contacts with their Facebook friends. Phone makers are also working on displaying Facebook profile pictures when contacts call. …

It won't please Rupert Murdoch, but Brett Brewer, one of the co-founders of InterMix Media, which News Corp. bought in 2005, believes that the battle for social networking supremacy is over, and that Facebook has won. In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Brewer says that MySpace, which was once a division of InterMix, would continue to grow strongly, but not as fast as Facebook. Between them, Facebook and MySpace have roughly 280 million worldwide users. "We built MySpace for people to find and connect with people they don't know," Brewer says in the interview. "Facebook is ... built …

Microsoft continues to lift search executives from Yahoo. This morning, the software giant announced the addition of Larry Heck, a former Yahoo VP who was in charge of making search results more relevant. Heck is the third Yahoo search executive to join Microsoft since November. The others were Sean Suchter and Qi Lu, who is now president of Microsoft's entire online services division. Microsoft ranks third in the U.S. search market, well behind No. 2 Yahoo, and miles behind search leader Google. However, the company is investing heavily in search technology to close that gap, and many industry watchers believe …