Founded in 2006, Goldcool develops and operates MMORPGs like Hades Realm and Dukes and Lords; the company was backed by an undisclosed amount of funding from IDG. Goldcool previously worked with Shanda (NSDQ: SNDA) Online, the online content and micro-payment services unit of Shanda Interactive, for the launch of its Zhu Hou Online game last year. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Shanda Games has also acquired the operating rights to The Legend of Mir III, the latest installment of the popular Legend of Mir franchise created by Actoz and Korea’s Wemade Entertainment. Shanda Games will be the exclusive operator of the game in mainland China. The deal includes the movie publishing rights to The Legend of Mir II; no details on when the film will go into production.

Lastly, Shanda Games also brokered a licensing deal with Korean game developer Nexon Corp for its 3D Bubble Fighter game, and will serve as the exclusive operator of Bubble Fighter in mainland China. Release .

ZDE was spun off the original Ziff Davis Media when it was acquired by PE firm Insight Venture Partners in 2007 for about $160 million. It then raised $20 million last year, but amidst the downturn, has done layoffs and a reorg since then. Just recently it announced that the company had restructured its debt, with an effort to “significantly reduce” the company

– Over $30 million in funding to date: Mochila’s third round was led by The Greenspun Group, a Henderson, Nevada-based investment firm that backs gaming and media companies, including the Las Vegas Sun daily newspaper, which has also taken a majority stake in the company. The amount was not disclosed. The company has raised over $30 million since 2006, and these new funds come at key time for New York-based Mochila. As the economy has turned worse, it finds that its aggregation services are suddenly more in demand. I spoke with Mochila’s Chen about what the funding and its timing means for the company. “We have worked with Greenspun before and we see them as a strategic investor,” Chen said. “It’s difficult for traditional venture capital firms to issue money to new and even existing firms. But with Greenspun, which has been around since 1950 and has a portfolio made up of real estate, travel and other businesses aside from media, we feel very comfortable weathering this current economic storm.”

– Aggregation comes of age: Getting major publishers to sign on to Mochila’s network has sometimes been a challenge, said Chen and Carolyn Bekkedahl, Mochila’s president and chief revenue officer. But the concept of syndicating content has finally caught on with large media companies. IDG already embraced the idea, when it opened its ad network to outside publishers nearly a year ago. In its arrangement with Mochila, IDG will have its content — from mag sites belonging to PC World, Macworld, Computerworld and GamePro — placed on newspaper websites that Mochila works with. The first sites include Tampa Bay Online, latimes.com, chicagotribune.com, and denverpost.com. But don’t expect IDG to bring its other ad network partners to Mochila. The deal is meant to broaden IDG’s tech-centric readership to a more general consumer audience. As Peter Longo, CEO, IDG Syndication and Network, told me: “We selected Mochila because they provide an existing distribution network for IDG content and offer a superior technology for building, customizing and serving our syndicated news and information. The purpose of syndication is to deliver IDG content to new audiences and to bring readers back to our sites so IDG TechNetwork sites will not be part of this initiative.”

While this is not a significant monetary setback for Federated, it does point to what the John Battelle-founded online-ad company is giving up as it continues to scale: Its focus has been on large-scale national advertisers and creating both general and custom programs with them, as opposed to the more ‘intimate” sells required for enterprise-focused vendors that GOM attracts. FM has a big-brand focus, for most part, and beyond its early start with tech sites, it has now moved into all kinds of other verticals like parenting, food, graphic arts, small business and others. More after the jump.

Gigaom founder Om Malik has previously publicly disagreed with some aspects of FM’s “conversational marketing” approach with some tech advertisers. And while that did lead to some tension last year, I spoke to both Chas Edwards, Publisher & Chief Revenue Officer of FM, and Paul Walborsky, CEO of GOM, and both reiterated that this parting was amicable, and of course, there are too many friendships at stake here.

For GOM, this new move comes after its biggish $4.5 million third round of funding that it announced last month. In recent months it has also acquired two blogs, jkOntheRun and TheAppleBlog, and appointed a new CEO. For IDG, this is a high-profile blog media company to bring into its fold. Its ad network was launched earlier this year, and had about 100 tech blogs as of March, and would not comment on this story. An IDG spokesman said they will have more announcements next month about it.

Update: Om wrote about the decision: “As our needs became more specialized, we sat down with the folks at Federated to try and figure out how we could continue to work together. But both sides quickly realized that instead it was time to wrap up what has been a successful business relationship.” Om says the IDG agreement covers the network’s seven current properties “and many more in the months to come.” Giga Omni Media also will continue internal sales.

Also, for the whole company, in 2002, 86 percent of the revenue from IDG

– Call it a comeback: “We had an inspired group within our company [that really wanted to bring the brand] back. We get a lot of natural traffic against it and The Standard is still one of the most storied brands in the history of the internet… We certainly didn’t want to do what was done in the past. When I used to read The Standard in print, [it was] like you were part of the internet community. Today, you can be part of a live community, with all the tools we’re talking about. We’re going to be leveraging Web 2.0 community tools to be able to harness the idea of the users – and the users will be an amalgam of media, content, venture capitalists, all the people that are traditionally attracted to that brand. And they will make predictions about key areas in the internet economy: ‘Will MySpace be bigger than Facebook?’ or ‘Will Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) sell X amount of iPods?’”

– Analysis and community: I also received a briefing on the new Industry Standard from Derek Butcher, The Industry Standard’s VP and GM and Infoworld CTO who was brought back to lead the reinvention. The new site will have two main components, a news channel and a community section. The emphasis on the news site will be on analysis, not breaking stories. That in turn, is intended to spark debate and conversation with the site’s community.

– Place your bets: Once it goes live, the community site and prediction market will be open to anyone. Users will be given $100,000 Industry Standard Dollars (for free) to buy “contracts” in order to vote and make predictions. There will be a rating system showing which users have been most successful in making their technology bets. Typically, topics will be introduced to the site’s prediction market on a “neutral” basis – 50/50 – and then users’ bets will determine whether a particular event – the site is already been testing when whether Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) will buy Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) – will come to pass. “As more people bet in favor of an event happening, the price/odds of that prediction will go up, obviously tapping out at 100 percent. But when it’s listed, a user comes in and knows the talks between Microsoft and Yahoo are really serious and places $1,000 Industry Standard Dollars in favor of that event. The odds would jump up depending on the volume. I can sit on my original bet until the event occurs or I can cash out and sell my shares as if they were stock.” So far, Intel (NSDQ: INTC) is placing a particularly big bet: the chipmaker has agreed to be the site’s main sponsor for the next three months.

In addition to The Standard, Carrigan also mentioned a number of other initiatives that IDG is pursuing, including building up its ad network and creating a new research tool that will offer data about users’ activity across its stable of sites called Market Fusion.

– Market Fusion: Designed as a marketers’ resource site that aggregates research, Market Fusion will be launched within the next two months. Carrigan: “It’s a way to quantify the level of engagement a user has with our websites. It’s represents an ROI model and will help us see how users make decisions about purchasing technology products.” The system will assign scores to anonymous users based on their viewing patterns on IDG sites – e.g., what webcasts they listen to, what pages they visit, what they download, or whether the user came in, did a search and never came back. “Our goal is to become the premium player in premium lead generation business – and I emphasize the word ‘premium.’” By that, Carrigan means unlike some notorious lead gen practices, users will not be given an iPod or other incentive to provide personal data to IDG and its advertisers.

– IDG Technology Network: Carrigan plans to expand IDG’s ad network with a greater number of blogs and websites outside of the company’s properties. “We’ll still sell ads on an individual basis, but a lot of marketers really want to buy on a network. We want to be able to offer them a larger audience. And that’s the impetus behind the IDG Technology Network.”

The audio of my conversation with Carrigan conversation can be streamed or downloaded here.

Though built as an “experiment”, the team wanted to apply it to the Standard because of historical brand strength. The new site will include “bloggers, some editorial content and substantial input from the community on different things”. “We’re going to have fun with it – it’s an experiment. Let’s just go with it and have fun with it – life’s too short.”

Carrigan: “The internet economy is more important than ever. We’ve been experimenting and trying things out and then we found a very willing sponsor that offered to buy out all the inventory for a substantial period of time. We’re trying to hire an editor – we do have a concept around this brand.” The site will have “built-in advertising and promotion”. Carrigan conceded the biggest fear was that the move would be “representative of a bubble” – so he promised “no rooftop parties”.