San Francisco - Four months after officially launching its community-driven online sports network, San Francisco-based Bleacher Report said on Friday that it has forged a new partnership with Fox Sports. Through the agreement, Fox Sports will feature original Bleacher Report content on its FoxSports.com site, alongside content from its own writers. More than 4,000 writers have contributed a total of 30,000 original stories to Bleacher Report since September.

Los Angeles - Microsoft's (NASD: MSFT) MSN has signed a deal with production company BermanBraun to create an entertainment news-focused destination site within MSN, set to launch in early 2009.

CES 2008: Bill Gates delivered his last keynote as Chairman of Microsoft at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. While he treated the audience to a hilarious celebrity-filled farewell video and played Guitar Hero on stage with Guns’n Roses star Slash, he did not make any really ground-breaking new announcements (as DMW’s readers predicted.) Gates’ keynote underscored the fact that Microsoft is still far from a digital entertainment company (but at least they are working on it.)

Redmond, Wash. - Microsoft's MSN said on Wednesday that it will now host entertainment industry news and opinion content from Variety.com. In addition to daily entertainment news, MSN will now feature columns and blogs from Variety editor-in-chief Peter Bart, as well as journalists Anne Thompson and Cynthia Littleton.

East Rutherford, N.J. - Microsoft said that its live webcasts of the Live Earth concerts this weekend served up over 10 million streams, marking the most simultaneous viewers for any online concert ever.

Washington - The Associated Press said this week that 85 more radio and 15 new television stations have added its Online Video Network and MSN player to their websites. The AP said that its network that airs video news reports now reaches 61 million unique visitors through over 1,800 affiliates.

How have sources of traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites changed over the past year? In May 2007, the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category received 24.95% of its upstream visits from search engines. This number increased by only 0.7% since May 2006, but the balance of search engines sending traffic has changed in favor of Google.

Redmond, Wash. - Microsoft has reopened its Soapbox video-sharing site, after ceasing new registrations for the service while it installed filters to block the uploading of copyrighted content. "We are also now conducting proactive filtering of all uploaded content, using technology from Audible Magic," reads a post on the Soapbox blog. "Audible Magic bases their filtering on the video's audio track and their database is being updated constantly. By using this technology, we see this as an important step to ensure the viability and success of Soapbox over the long run."

Redmond, Wash. - As part of the upcoming Live Earth climate crisis concert series, a new song from recording artist Madonna has been placed for free download on Microsoft's LiveEarth.MSN.com site, which will also stream the concert series live on July 7. MSN said it will donate 25 cents for each of the first million downloads of "Hey You" -- a song written specifically for the Live Earth event -- to the Alliance for Climate Protection.

New York - Mindshare Entertainment announced on Tuesday that it will produce an original Web series on motherhood, starring Leah Remini of "The King of Queens," that will incorporate storylines generated by moms. Debuting on May 11 on MSN, the five-episode "In the Motherhood" series will be directed by Peter Lauer. The webisodes will also be viewable on the websites of Sprint and Suave, the series' two sponsors, and promoted on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" and in People magazine.

This morning (very early this morning) I was interviewed on BBC TV for the World Business Report about Yahoo!'s earnings announcement. I wanted to share the updated search stats I pulled for the interview here and share some of my comments.

New York - NBC Universal and News Corp. announced on Thursday the formation of a joint venture that will launch a video-sharing site this summer to compete with YouTube, with thousands of hours of programming to be distributed through partners AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo.

Los Angeles - FoxSports.com said on Tuesday that it has launched the first fantasy baseball game on FoxSports.com on MSN. The free game offers both standard public leagues and customizable private leagues, supported by baseball data from FoxSports.com.