Whenever you think of Rupert Murdoch do you almost always think of Dennis Potter? If so, then there is a strong chance you - 15 years ago this week - were watching this interview with English dramatist Denis Potter on Channel 4.  http://www.amazon.com/Dennis-Potter-Last-Interview/dp/6303614566 If not, then you missed one of the most stiking and memorable interviews ever broadcast.  Potter, terminally ill with pancreatic cancer gave his final interview to Melvyn Bragg discussing his life, imminent death and his work with wry wit, warmth and charm.  Viewers will remember Potter alternately sipping from a hip flask of morphine and glass of champagne in order to manage the pain of the cancer that was riddling his body.  They may also remember Potter revealing to Bragg that he had chosen to give his cancerous tumor a name.  He had chosen to call it Rupert.  After Rupert Murdoch. However you might feel about Rupert Murdoch yourself, that's the kind of TV moment that stays with you.  Potter passed away a few months later having dedicated his last months to completing two more TV dramas and is now probably relatively unknown and/or irrelavant to anyone under 30.  Murdoch on the other hand continues to thrive on in rude health and is well known and highly relevant to the under 30s as the owner and controller of MySpace.  Here's an excerpt from an article from this mornings Observer column ( via Memex 1.1). 

  'MYSPACE' is also a bit of a misnomer. It implies a tiny slice of cyberspace that is all yours, but of course it isn't; it belongs to Rupert Murdoch. The BBC's online commentator, Bill Thompson, illustrates the distinction with the analogy of a public park versus a shopping mall. You can do your own thing (within the law) in the former, but do it only at the proprietor's pleasure in the latter. So it is with MySpace - as Tila Tequila, a singer who is one of the site's most visible users, discovered. She had attracted attention by linking to more than 1.7 million friends on her MySpace page. The New York Times reports how, in an attempt to promote her first album, she added to the page a new music player and music store, called the Hoooka, created by an LA-based start-up. MySpace users listened to her music and played the accompanying videos 20,000 times over one weekend. But the Hoooka disappeared on the Sunday after her oldest 'friend', the aformentioned Anderson, personally contacted Tequila to object to what she had done with 'her' space. It turns out that MySpace objects to software widgets that enable users to sell items or advertise without prior approval or without entering into a direct partnership with News Corporation. So any social networkers shocked and apalled to discover that MySpace is really RupertSpace should ask themselves a simple question: why do you think he bought the thing in the first place?