Arkayne, which makes a plug-in designed to automatically add related links to web pages, has raised $1 million in an angel round. The plug-in scans all of the posts on a website in order to automatically suggest related items that a visitor should read. A version for bloggers with “moderate…

iFollo, a site that lets members share stories about their run-ins with celebrities, has raised $1 million in a funding round from real estate investor Robert Trump, who is also a backer of game publisher ZeniMax Media. On iFollo, anybody can post an anecdote about meeting a celebrity and rate…

For some critics, the lack of participation from content companies at yesterday’s iPad launch threw some cold water on predictions for how the new device could help the media business regain revenues lost to the web. But if you looked hard enough, publishers were there and, more importantly, some have…

MSNBC.com is really getting serious about this whole breaking news thing: First it took over management of the @BreakingNews twitter feed from the company BNO News late last year, and now, it is buying the BreakingNews.com domain name from its current owner, to build its real time news delivery service.…

Update: Jan 28, 2010: The total investment for the major stake is about $4 million, according to an SEC filing by Loud3r. It is the year of low-cost content creators and aggregators. In that vein, Loud3r, a company that had to reboot earlier this year after some early missteps, has…

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is integrating with Facebook in a big way, rolling out Facebook Connect across its properties worldwide. Yahoo already had some limited tie-ins with Facebook; for instance, its new home page lets users edit their statuses on Facebook directly from Yahoo.com. However, the new relationship goes much further,…

The NYTimes.com will close the curtain on its homepage aggregation tool, Times Extra, on Dec. 1, a year after it began beta testing the feature. Although Times Extra is still being promoted on the main homepage, the alternate home page has a note telling users that they’ll still be able…

Jim Brady, who has been hired to create a local Washington, D.C., news site for the company that owns Politico, says he has a clear idea of what he wants his new venture to be: replicable, digital and with a web-only focus. Brady, a former web editor for the Washington…

Updated: The full amount Hot Potato raised is $1.4 million, per an SEC filing. Hot Potato, an online startup that hopes to connect people watching live events in real-time, has raised $1 million in a funding round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures, MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka reports. Tech…

Web series production companies are struggling to find sponsorship deals to sustain themselves, so how do the sites trying to make a business out of reviewing the shows (and the production process behind them) have a chance at staying alive? By banding together to create a bigger brand that—hopefully—attracts more…

Perhaps the central struggle for publishers is figuring out a way to get their content out as widely as possible while also monetizing some of that distribution. In an effort to provide some order to the “link economy,” the Fair Syndication Consortium has created some new guidelines for how content…

News video-sharing and clipping service Redlasso has relaunched, giving bloggers access to video and audio clips from over 100 TV stations. The company secured licensing deals with *Meredith* Broadcasting, Journal Broadcasting Local Television, Gray Television and Barrington Broadcasting; RedLasso brokered its first new licensing deal with Fox, for content from…

News sharing site Digg is taking a step toward creating an ad network that will include outside websites, Adweek reports. It’s a next step up from the cost-per-click program Digg instituted this summer, when the site interspersed ads among the streams of story posts. Like its posts, users were also…

By now, there’s no need to repeat the backstory of Breaking News Online to the news junkies among us, especially those of us on Twitter and iPhone. If you do need the background, here’s the story. I was never a follower on Twitter, but I have been using its iPhone…

Scribd is giving certain news sites that use its document sharing service to embed legal filings and PDFs the chance to stick their own logos on the company’s reader. So far, Scribd has arrangements with The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Mediabistro (full…

The Washington Post and Bloomberg News are launching a new syndication service Jan. 1, 2010—the Washington Post (NYSE: WPO) News Service with Bloomberg News, which will provide daily content from the paper and the financial newswire to newspapers, website and other subs. The move follows by a day the news…

Updated: Facebook has purchased social sharing service FriendFeed—in a deal that should give it both additional technology and engineers to beef up its product. Financial terms of the deal were not released, although the WSJ puts the price at nearly $50 million, including $15 million in cash, with the remainder…

Now that there are so many social networks, the next challenge is helping users figure how to manage all their accounts. John Muse of leveraged-buyout fame, Broadcast.com co-founder Todd Wagner, and Inktomi co-founder Bennie Bray, along with other investors, have put roughly $5 million in Nomee, a Plano, Texas-based startup…

Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) is licensing its web search technology to Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)—but it is holding on to its Delicious social bookmarking site, which offers one alternative way to find items on the web by sifting through sites that people have bookmarked. And on Tuesday, Yahoo announced several changes to…