Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has an image police - but an arrest they have made may be mistaken. A blogger using its SkyDrive cloud storage service says it froze his account when it confused a famous work of art with pornography.

Second on Huffington Post’s international expansion list, after its recent Canadian launch, will be a new UK site, now scheduled for launch on July 6.

Less than a year after its last round, GigaOm is upping its investment take to $15 million. The $6 million new round, led by Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) Ventures with existing investors Alloy Ventures and True Ventures taking part, will go toward a major expansion of its subscription research business…

AOL (NYSE: AOL) CEO Tim Armstrong warned that layoffs would be coming last week, and today, the pink slips were released. Armstrong spoke about the decision during a Q&A keynote session this morning at the Bloomberg Businessweek Media Summit. In a separate interview with paidContent when he left the conference,…

Ashley Norris is CEO of branded content advisory Sutro Digital and director of Anorak Publishing, including the Whoateallthepies.tv soccer blog... There’s an awful lot of heat at the moment about both paywalls and paid for iPad magazine apps. Yet paywalls as a concept haven’t been bothering the indie media sector…

Zemanta, a web add-on that injects blog posts and CMS articles with links to related material, has raised its biggest venture round so far in order to bump its sales efforts and product development.

The independent publishing startup behind regional blog aggregator AsianCorrespondent.com is considering launching in other verticals, after securing angel investment money for near-term expansion. We wrote about Hybrid News, an online publisher set up by James Craven after he left Bristol-based business magazine publisher GDS International, last October. Its first site,…

Some consolidation in the European internet market: GoAdv, a pan-European Internet company, has bought Italian professional blog aggregator Blogosfere. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. A spokesperson for the company today tells us that it was an all-cash deal for a “lower seven-digit” sum. Blogosfere is an…

Now branching out in to e-books after recently marking its first birthday, Tina Brown’s Daily Beast is starting to syndicate its webzine content out through third-party destinations. The IAC-backed current affairs zine has just inked deals to publish through MSN in the U.S. and UK, with further agreements with Yahoo…

Channel 4’s 4iP fund is continuing its pattern of investing in projects that “keep an eye on money and power” by funding Northern Ireland’s best-known political blog, Slugger O’Toole, paidContent:UK has learned. It’s 4iP’s first joint investment with media agency Northern Ireland Screen. The investment size is unknown, along with…

Bright Station Ventures investor Dan Wagner is declaring a “win” after buying 10 fashion blogs from the former Shiny Media. Now he intends to place the sites alongside his social clothes shopper Osoyou.com plus another yet-to-launch website. “This is an important win,” Wagner told paidContent:UK, hours after his four-week opposition…

Shiny Media is not dying quietly. While writers await payment from the collapsed blog publisher, its founders and investors are locked in a legal dispute over how the company was placed in administration… Brightstation VC Dan Wagner tells Telegraph.co.uk: “Shaa Wasmund and I, as directors of Shiny Media Limited and…

The independent web publishing community may have lost Shiny Media for now, but it’s not all doom and gloom. Kikizo - a below-the-radar, entertainment-centric web publisher that mixes contract online writing with own-brand content - is launching BlurayDaily.com, a site billing itself as “a high-definition crack den” for movie disc…

Shiny Media co-founder Ashley Norris has retaken control of his WhoAteAllThePies football blog from the blog house for his new publishing enterprise. Shiny shut the site in September during cutbacks following Norris’ departure a month earlier.

A new network has formed to try again at creating a UK blog enterprise of any scale. BeautyAndTheDirt.com editor Krista Madden has started Handpicked Media, focusing on beauty, style, entertainment, food, art and culture.

Not content with inviting readers to debate in a virtual pub, The Financial Times is now asking them to join senior writers in a kind of digital editorial conference to help shape the content and tone of the paper’s leader column. Starting today, leader writers will be posting articles on…

These days, you’re more likely to read of news sites cutting back or shutting down entirely than expanding overseas. No such caution from Stuart Miles, owner and editor of UK gadget review and tech news site Pocket Lint, who is moving to New York from June—initially for six months—to expand…

We can safely say we’ve never seen this before: the Trinity Mirror-owned Teesside Gazette is recruiting 70 school students as bloggers for its post-code level network of news channels on GazetteLive.co.uk as part of a new vocational course. Trinity has linked-up with Stockton Schools to help create a new Creative…

British blogs aggregator fav.or.it has managed to secure £500,000 of what’s called second-round funding, despite the recession from a mixture of angel investors and £125,000 from Finance South East, a development fund for the south east of England, founder Nick Halstead blogs (and via TCUK). The money is going to…