Have you seen MySpace to test news service to boost ad revenue?

This is very big if you have stock! I am sure that Rupert Murdoch are going to do very well with this venture. This is a must read!

NEW YORK (Reuters) - News Corp.’s MySpace social network plans to test a service on Thursday that scours the Web for news stories and lets users rate them, aiming to lure more advertisers to the Rupert Murdoch-controlled company.

The service, called MySpace News, resembles a mix of Google Inc.’s Google News, which collects stories and arranges them based on thematic similarities and Digg.com, which displays stories suggested by its readers and displays them according to their popularity ranking, executives said.

MySpace News is an attempt by the company to keep its more than 100 million unique visitors, according to comScore Network’s March figures, on the popular social network site longer.

News Corp. executives are aggressively courting entertainment and other types of content from other media sources as it seeks to bolster a leading position on the Internet, executives have said. News Corp. expects to generate over $500 million in revenue from its digital businesses this fiscal year.

Before the launch, MySpace users would have to leave the service to read news on the Internet. MySpace users spend about 10 average minutes per visit in the U.S. and visit the site about 19 times per user per month in March, according to comScore.

The service, long rumored, will have 25 main topics and about 300 sub-categories ranging from celebrities and gossip to autos and fashion.

"We’ve had a ton of different brands who hadn’t previously worked with MySpace and now do because of the service," Brian Norgard, co-founder of Newroo, a company purchased by News Corp. last year, which created MySpace News’ technology, said in an interview.

Categories such as autos, for example, could draw big autos manufacturers to the service seeking to reach MySpace members interested in the topic.

Executives also said its service would draw from a wider collection of news sources than Google News. Google News draws from about 4,500 sources, according to its site. News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media executives declined to specify the news outlets.

The technology scans thousands of news sources and displays them on the site based on how popular the stories are to its readers who can vote on them.

But services such as Google News, which displays brief excerpts of stories and photos from other companies on its site, has drawn the ire of news organizations seeking to build their own Internet businesses. Google recently settled a closely watched copyright dispute with Agence France-Presse.

The deal now clears the way for Google to continue displaying text excerpts and photos from the agency.

News publishers can request to have their news feed removed from the MySpace service.

Read more at Reuters