VentureBeat

Back in July, we mentioned that Microsoft was working on a YouTube clone.

Tomorrow it will be unveiled, according to Microsoft employee Kurt Shintaku, who doesn’t seem to know whether to call it by its internal codename “Warhol,” or its more boring official name “MSN Soapbox.”

I’ve been working with Warhol for the past couple of months and I really like it. It’s a glitzier version of Putfile that only uses Windows Media, which has been my mainstay for hosting content for a long time. The community is pretty active and the interface is superb.

It’s really bandwidth efficient, you can “copy” the content locally to your own machine if you have the right tools (instead of using some proprietary wrapper around it like you do with Google), it’s optimized to your network speed, and doesn’t require any plug ins or anything.

Why this is being released under the “MSN” brand is beyond us. Microsoft’s branding, between Live and MSN, is getting confusing.

LiveSide has more details: Soapbox allows for user uploaded videos of up to 100mb, in AVI, ASF, WMV, MOV, MPEG 1/2/4, 3GPP, DV file formats…

Blogging software company Six Apart announced today it has bought the RSS feed reader company, Rojo.

Rojo was just one of start-ups gunning for position in the crowded field of giving users with a way to collect and read RSS feeds, or subscriptions to news and other sources that come to you automatically. These RSS readers are popular because they save you time — you don’t have to go out and access the sites or publications yourself.

While Rojo had its fans, big companies had come along and offered competing services. Bloglines, an early leader, was bought by Ask. Yahoo has its own service, as does Google. There a bunch of others, including Newsgator and Attensa.

Six Apart’s statement about its plans didn’t sound very promising. The acquisition appeared designed to scoop up some talent: “Four people will become core members of the Six Apart Team: Chris Alden, Aaron Emigh, Andrew Bunner and Jim Ramsey,” it said.

Lower down, the statement made clear Six Apart intends to sell most of Rojo, and its Nooz service: “Rojo and Nooz will continue to be independent entities, and we expect to sell a majority interest in the services business within a few months. You can see more on Rojo’s blog as well.”

The alternative interpretation of this, of course, is that Six Apart is trying to become a private equity-like Web 2.0 investor — buying and selling companies strategically in an effort to make money. This, we doubt. But it has been playing with its money lately. It has raised $12 million earlier in March, and has bought Splashblog, and LiveJournal.

Rojo’s investors included TPG Ventures, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway, an early investor in Google via his Angel Investors fund. Liz at GigaOM notes Rojo had raised more than $3.5 million in funding.

And what’s this in our headline about Mojo, you ask? We’re referring to Rojo’s own description of itself:

Rojo means “RSS with mojo.” That’s our secret ingredient for creating the best RSS feed reader on the web and so you can discover and read news and blogs as efficiently as possible