The last time Rupert Murdoch made a bet on the internet, he looked very smart. In the summer of 2005, Murdoch bought a company called Intermix Media for $580m in cash. Not long after, social networking sites became the hottest thing going and deeply coveted by other major media groups. Murdoch’s acquisition of the company that owned a little site called MySpace looked especially smart.

Since then, Murdoch’s News Corp has been concentrating on old-media matters – the acquisition of Dow Jones, the launch of the Fox Business cable television channel in the US and so on. Now, though, he is flirting with cyberspace again: there is talk that Murdoch could provide Yahoo with an alternative to selling to Microsoft. The idea floating about is that News Corp would take a stake in Yahoo of about 20 per cent, allowing MySpace and Yahoo to work together somehow.