New York - News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) Wall Street Journal on Thursday made its editorial page content free to read online, in the first move on a possible path towards making the entire paper available for free online. The newly free offering includes WSJ's editorial page content, columnists, and both original video and clips from its weekly TV program on Fox News Channel. The paper described the move as, "as close as we'll get to conceding there is such a thing as a free lunch."

London - The CD version of Radiohead's "In Rainbows" entered the U.S. album sales charts at No. 1 for the week ended Jan. 6, and was also the top-selling album in the U.K., Canada, Japan and France, Reuters reported. Following the band's historical Internet release of the record, where fans could choose to pay any price -- or nothing -- for the album as an MP3 download, the physical version of the record sold 122,000 in the U.S. its first week out.

Los Angeles - News Corp.'s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace online social network on Thursday launched MySpace Celebrity, a new content channel focused on entertainment culture and related news, blogs, videos and events. The company billed the offering as "the premier online destination for celebrities to communicate directly with their fans," and announced more than 300 official celebrity MySpace profiles hosted on the channel -- among them Britney Spears, Jamie Foxx, Lauren Conrad, Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hanks. The channel will also offer original behind-the-scenes videos, "Artist on Artist" interviews and "The Fit," which will give users a look inside celebrities' closets.

Tokyo - Japanese electronics giant Matsushita (NYSE: MC) announced on Thursday that it will change its official company name to Panasonic, the brand name its products are known by in the U.S. and elsewhere outside of Japan. The company had been using the Matsushita name -- after founder Konosuke Matsushita -- since 1935. All Matsushita products, including those sold under the National brand in Japan, will be labeled Panasonic by the end of 2010.

Tokyo - Sony Japan (NYSE: SNE) has announced plans to discontinue both the 20GB and 60GB models of its PlayStation 3 game console in Japan, choosing instead to focus on a 40GB model introduced there in November, GamesIndustry.biz reports. The company is similarly phasing out its 60GB PS3 in favor of the 40GB model in Europe, and cut the price on the U.S. 60GB model when it introduced an 80GB model in the U.S. last August.

London - U.K.-based digital music retailer 7digital.com has announced that year-on-year sales were up 188%, which the company credited to its ability to offer 70% of its 3.5 million-track catalog in the MP3 format. Top selling albums in 2007 included Kylie Minogue's "X," Arctic Monkeys' "Favourite Worst Nightmare" and The White Stripes' "Icky Thump." The company also benefited from an exclusive deal to offer Radiohead's back catalog digitally, as six of these albums were in the top 20. "2008 is set to be the year DRM is gone for good," said 7digital managing director Ben Drury. "We've already seen all four majors make efforts to offer DRM-free downloads and by the summer DRM will likely be resigned to the history books."

Sausalito, Calif. - Sony Pictures Entertainment's (NYSE: SNE) Crackle video entertainment site on Thursday announced the premiere of "Penn Says," an unscripted Web series created by magician and pundit Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller fame. Four one-to-three minute videos will be added weekly, featuring Jilette's rants on politics, celebrities, current events and other topics.

Emeryville, Calif. - Online new and used bookseller Alibris announced on Thursday that it has expanded its movie and music marketplace, which now includes millions of new and used CDs and DVDs from thousands of sellers, as well as older formats including LPs, VHS tapes and Laserdiscs. The company said it tapped Macrovision's All Media Guide to add cover art and product information on the media offerings. Alibris also offers more than 75 million new and used books.

San Francisco - After revealing that just one in five consumers chose to pay $5 for a 320kbps MP3 version of Saul Williams' "The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust" album, rather than downloading a free, 192kpbs version, Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor expressed mixed feelings on the numbers in an interview with CNET News.com posted on Thursday.

Sacramento, Calif. - The state of California has appealed a federal court ruling that struck down a 2005 law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. In August 2007, the U.S. District Court struck down the law, which was introduced by then Assemblyman and now State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco/San Mateo), and signed into law by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

*A correction has been made to this story.

Las Vegas - A Miami-based company has developed a set-top box that will deliver over 20,000 DVD-quality adult films over a broadband connection to consumers' home televisions, the Associated Press reports.

Audible, Inc., a provider of spoken audio entertainment and information on the Internet, today announced that Glenn Rogers, Chief Operating Officer, will leave the company to return to his consulting practice. Mr. Rogers joined Audible in 2005, taking leave from his practice that focuses on helping organizations, particularly female- and minority-owned businesses, deliver positive results by implementing collaborative and data-driven management systems and practices. Before his work as a consultant, Mr. Rogers was a senior executive at PSE&G.

http://www.audible.com

Los Angeles - Universal Studios' commitment to exclusively back Toshiba's next-generation HD DVD format has expired, Daily Variety reports, in a development that gives Sony's (NYSE: SNE) Blu-ray, which gained exclusive support from Warner Bros. (NYSE: TWX) earlier this week, another leg up in the DVD format war.

Washington - Traffic to video-sharing sites like Google's (NASD: GOOG) YouTube has doubled in the past year, with 48% of Internet users now saying they have watched videos on such websites, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Some 15% of respondents said they had visited a video-sharing site within the past day, compared with 8% who said the same thing a year ago.

A site's signup page is the second most important page on a site (the most important is the home page itself) because this is where you're asking for committment. Everyone worries about the home page (and still don't do a good job), but most companies do a poor job with the signup page. For example, HAMweather's is aesthetically-challenged, and Last.fm's doesn't convey enough information. This article about signup pages by Tim Bednar is a good read. His list of important signup-page elements is:

This week's launch of Wikia Search is the latest example of a human powered search engine. Mahalo and Cha-Cha are two other recent entrants. This week we've seen a spike in daily visits to Wikia Search, as you'd expect. In my digging the thing that stood as interesting to me is Mahalo's growth. The following chart shows the weekly share of US Internet visits to Mahalo and Cha-Cha over the past six months.

San Francisco - Linden Labs, operator of the online virtual world Second Life, has instituted a ban on unregulated banking in the wake of the dissolution of an in-game bank which saw investors lose the equivalent of $750,000, Wired.com reported.

UK Internet traffic to the BBC’s iPlayer website increased 14-fold between the week ending 8 December 2007 and the week ending 5 January. The online catch-up TV service ranked as the 80th most visited website in the UK for the week ending 5 January 2008, having peaked at number 62 on New Year’s Day.