Yesterday, the New York Post began blocking all access to their website for those using the iPad version of the Safari web browser. Instead of viewing the website, visitors see a large notice informing them that NY Post content “is now only accessible on the iPad through the New York Post App.” The NY Post iPad app costs $1.99, and is currently available in the app store. It should be noted that this is a subscription app, and further fees would apply.

Oddly, the NY Post blockade only affects Safari. If you were to use another iPad browser, such as Opera, you would have no trouble viewing NY Post content.

News Corp, which owns the NY Post, has been a forerunner in subscription content on multiple platforms, rolling out The Daily a few months ago. But the move to block a specific subset of users in order to drive app sales is a bit unusual. Prior to blockade, Safari users on iPads that visited the NY Post saw large ads that prompted them to purchase the app. The old ads were simply suggestions, but trying to force users to purchase the app could result in fewer app downloads, and more angry readers.

(photo via The Examiner, Paid Content via TechMeme)

Only a few days after the Wall Street Journal reported that News Corp is shopping Myspace on the cheap, All Things Digital is reporting that News Corp’s IGN – best known as a video game culture destination — has bought the similar, though smaller Internet network of sites, UGO, which is probably best known for video game site, 1up.com. It is being reported that the acquisition and merger will be announced within the next few days, but that isn’t all: IGN is planned to split from News Corp and act as a standalone business that will keep its focus on video game culture, news and reviews.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that bids to purchase the once-mighty MySpace from News Corp could begin next week. The rumored sell-off could come at an asking price of $100 million, a far cry from the $580 million that News Corp shelled out in 2005 when they bought the social networking site. Of course, a lot has changed since 2005, namely the rapid rise, expansion, and ubiquity of Facebook.

Once the poster-child for the then-embryonic web 2.0, MySpace has seen declining membership and, more recently, massive staff reductions. Though MySpace has enjoyed some success by re-inventing itself as a music and entertainment hub, it hasn’t been able to recapture the site’s early momentum.

By comparison, the Daily Register reports that in January Facebook was valued at around $50 billion.

(WSJ via Yahoo News via Slashdot, U.K. Register)

So in case you’ve been living under an Internet-proof rock for the past few hours, News Corp’s über-buzzy new iPad publication The Daily launched today. And the price is right: The app is available on the Apple store as a free download, a subscription costs about 14 cents a day (99 cents per week), and a yearly subscription is $40 — leaps and bounds better than the old regime of huge, CD-ROM-like iPad magazines that cost $4 or $5 an issue, no better than their newsstand counterparts. Also, for its first two weeks, everything will be free, courtesy of sponsor Verizon Wireless.

Still, we believe in checking stuff out before you buy it, and if you don’t have an iPad on hand, live outside of the US, or are simply leery of downloading apps that automatically renew subscriptions until you cancel them, it’s possible to check out the articles thanks to Google. (You can also see individual articles when friends share links, but these do not allow you to browse the whole publication, and we’re assuming here that you don’t have rich, monocled friends willing to shell out a princely $0.14 cents per day and then send you links.)

CEO of Newscorp Rupert Murdoch unveiled The Daily the subscription-based news app for the iPad earlier today making it the first of its kind on Apple’s app store. The app will deliver text, video, and other media for $0.14 a day, or about $0.99 a week.

Using a layout similar to Apple’s coverflow, The Daily delivers news content tailored for tablets. From Ars Technica:

“There’s no paper, no multimillion dollar presses, no trucks, and we’re passing on these savings to the reader,” Murdoch said to the crowd. “The target audience is the 50 million Americans expected to own tablets in the next year.”

Less than a year after Steve Jobs revealed the iPad to the world and launched tablet computing from niche to mainstream, details are emerging about The Daily, the daily newspaper to be published exclusively for tablets, dreamt up by none other than tech visionary … Rupert Murdoch.

In a piece recently published in Women’s Wear Daily, reporter John Koblin gives us the thoroughest look yet at The Daily, conceived as “a tabloid sensibility with a broadsheet intelligence.” This is a serious undertaking. Over the past three months, News Corp. has assembled a newsroom of more than 100 staffers, including such heavy hitters as former New York Post gossip columnist Richard Johnson and New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones. While the focus will be on old-school reporting, there’ll be a reasonably sized video and design staff as well, underscoring a commitment to the new medium.

While The Daily is conceived as a publication for all tablet computers, the iPad, with its 95.5 percent market share, is pretty much the only game in town at present, though Android is expected to catch up eventually. And based on WWD‘s report, Apple is very interested:

Remember MySpace? It was that thing that was big before Facebook was big. It had all those wacky custom mouse cursor sets and everyone’s page had a bunch of music videos they liked and you hated? No? Well, it existed, and believe it or not, was once the be-all end-all of social networking. Aside from fading into relative obscurity once Facebook hit the scene, the biggest problem currently facing MySpace is a threat from News Corp.–who bought MySpace in 2005–saying that MySpace’s business better be fixed soon.

(Before we dig too far into this, you may want to visit the 56k Modem Emulator, to establish the proper sonic mood. Ah, that beloved squeal.)

A colleague (who is handsome and wise) recently discovered an old Media Metrix report delineating “World Wide Web Audience Ratings” for December 1998. It’s a remarkable study, categorizing thousands of sites and conglomerated web companies.

This thing is like finding election results from 1880; like coming across the original Billboard music chart. It looks familiar, like you should know all of the component elements, but it’s unrecognizable. As though they’re all brands made up for movies.

The Rankings
Home and Work, Combined
We’ll start where the report starts – at those sites most popular when combining home and work visits. (Please see above diagram for clarification.) Before I list them, I want you to try and think up what the top fifty websites were in 1998. Got it?

Yeah, you’re wrong: