Rupert Murdoch announced yesterday that News Corp. intended to create the next "great portal" by making a huge investment in its recently purchased myspace.com. Never sell Rupert Murdoch short. Do not forget that mixed in with all of his great financial and asset purchases over the years, the longest shot paid off. That was the idea that he could create another great television network in the USA when he launced the Fox Network in the 1980s. The odds against him were immense. Yet he pulled it off and today Fox is the equal if not better than the original big 3 (ABC, NBC and CBS).

Back in 1994 I predicted at an IBM press conference at an Internet World trade show that there would one day be 5 large portals and that one might even "be worth $1 billion!!" I predicted that AOL would be one of the portals, but had no idea what the others might be. I added that I was sure that Rupert Murdoch would take his Web site Delphi and turn that into a super portal. However, he dumped Delphi soon after and here we are today.

So can Rupert do it? I doubt it. I think he can make Myspace much larger and very profitable, but I think that getting the necessary "mindshare" to use Myspace is near impossible to obtain at this stage in Web history. One way to jump start such a concept would be to buy something such as Cnet.com. Cnet has lots of great communities and these appeal to all ages. Take Cnet and combine it in some fashion with Myspace and then you have something.

Myspace by itself will develop nicely and be quite powerful. But it lacks mega-mindshare. I doubt that even Rupert Murdoch can get mega-mindshare without jump starting Myspace with another large acquisition.