The Hollywood Reporter speaks with the wily old fox, Rupert Murdoch in great details. He uses phrases that hark back to 1999 in his “come to jesus” moment about Internet, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear him say that his company had been on an Internet defensive and buying MySpace was his first aggressive move into the space. Clearly, he is listening to some of his new lieutenants like Ross Levinsohn, who runs Fox Interactive Media.

In this nice little talk about blogs, and power of the community, there is the underlying truth: its about the advertising. The ad-dollars shifting away from traditional forms of media to newer mediums, it behooves News Corp to adapt. (That is precisely the reason I firmly believe that AOL should remain part of Time Warner, despite losing 300 users an hour, and if necessary, selling a piece to Comcast and getting some broadband traction is the best option for TW, than say teeming up with others seeking short term page view pop!)

Anyone can buy what they want, shop where they want, talk to anybody in the world that they want (and) state their own opinions. There’s no mystery to a blog: Put up your thoughts (and) find friends….there are lots and lots of communities, and they can all blog — they can all write in a personal diary every week, or whatever they want.

There are three very large Internet companies: America Online, which delivers data, which is really what’s keeping them very strong; everyone in the world goes to Yahoo! to do their e-mail, and search with Google. I think online, it’s the search for groupings, identifying search for groupings and providing sites for that — to meet, talk, discuss. These are very interesting; there are huge numbers of people. (We’re going to be) learning a lot about them and then selling advertising to them. Not too obtrusively, but when you target, there’s no waste: 50,000 people over here or 5 million people over there.

Murdoch seems to be pretty serious about the broadband business as well. I tell you my guest columnist, Robert Young is one smart cookie… he predicted this, and well, the man himself is hinting at something with wireless.

We’re not yet up in broadband. We’re starting in partnerships with some of the phone companies, but we may have to provide our own solutions, which would be great because (satellite TV is) wireless and therefore mobile.