Look back for a sec and try to remember which brand has been the most talked about, most advertised, and most hyped last year. Well, social media services provider Vitrue did more than just that, measuring the amount of mentions of around 2000 brands, naming the 100 most social brands of 2008. The top, the runners-up, and the gaming brands are all in the full article.

Monday morning in Virgina, a 6-year-old kid misses his bus to school. What's a kid to do? He's about to be late! Well, obviously, take your family's car and get your tardy butt to the campus, of course! And that's just what the kid (name undisclosed, so we'll just call him "Lil Nicky" - you'll know why in a bit) did. Aren't kids just amazing these days? If they're not fighting battles in court to legalize hedgehogs, they're driving themselves to school.

*Update* CNN video included!

Okay, this isn't hard news, but it deserves posting for the same reasons that explain why clips of George W. Bush dancing, awkwardly, in some foreign country deserve airing all over CNN from early morning until the evening highlights. A few days ago, there was this self-proclaimed hoax of Halo 3 being playable on the PlayStation Portable uploaded on YouTube. If you don't quite remember that hit the jump, to watch it.

Anyhow, several days after the Halo 3 on PSP hoax video was upload, video author IIxDylanxII revealed the reasons why he embarked on that little stunt of his. Apparently there was a method to the madness, and the ultimate purpose was to see how well people read, or if people bother to read through long bodies of text at all.

We'd like to explain it to you in detail, but we don't want to drown you in large bodies of text the way he did, just click on the embed below and get a better idea. Oh and before we go we're tagging this under off-topic and opinions and analysis, but we're not giving our take, we're asking for yours. Well, what's your take on his experiment? Does IIxDylanxII's logic hold water? Did IIxDylanxII succeed in driving home a crucial point? Or does IIxDylanxII somehow ultimately contradict himself? Let us know in the comments.

Watch the original hoax after the Jump.

First and foremost, we would like to give our sincerest condolences to the family and friends of those 32 people (33 including the gunman) involved in today's shootout at the Virginia Tech campus. While everyone is still reeling in shock from the events at Norris Hall this morning, we share everyone's sentiment that it is indeed a horrible tragedy. Already, CNN is even calling it the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

But why post something that's not gaming related? Well, we would have wanted to avoid this whole issue altogether, however, someone had apparently brought videogames (something oh so close to all of our hearts) into the picture. Hence, the relevancy to these blogs.

As Kotaku reports, Jack Thompson spoke on FOXNews about the Virgina Tech shooting, saying that the massacre is linked to videogames. Now, we do not know to what extent Jack Thompson said this and we do not know the exact context in which the attorney said this. While it's pretty hard to form any substantial and unbiased judgment from such a lack of details, CobaltBlue, as a comment to Kotaku's post, sheds some light on what happened in FOXNews for us:

@possiblymalignant: Fox News Live was calling him a "School Shooting Specialist", or that's what he's calling himself now. All he talked about though was linking video games and "murder simulators" to school shootings. I guess we can look forward to a new Jack Thompson crusade now.

Maybe there is more to Thompson's statement than just "the Virgina Tech shooting was due to videogames" after all? And we have yet to find an actual video, transcript, or news clipping from FOXNews or any other news source. For now, this is what we have.

Pic courtesy of FOXNews.

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Update: We've managed to grab the Fox News interview with Jack Thompson over at YouTube which was uploaded by rgbyhkr. Here's the clip.

Contrary to rumors, Microsoft's Shane Kim is saying that the company is not interested in buying Take-Two Interactive, and for good reason.

CNN's Chris Morris talks about the potentially powerful acquisition, citing Shane Kim and some pretty good reasons why Microsoft wouldn't want to take over Take-Two:

One company that says it's not in the running is Microsoft. Because today's independent publishers are platform agnostic - that is to say, they build games for all major systems - taking over one would result in a massive revenue loss for Microsoft, as all development would be redirected toward the Xbox 360.

"We could never launch an acquisition bid at a third party publisher," said Shane Kim, corporate vice president of Microsoft (Charts) Game Studios.

Of course, where there's a will (for rumormongering), there's a way. "Potential buyers" now include Ubisoft, Activision, Bono (care of Elevation Partners), and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Sorry folks, Cthulthu won't be making any bids this time, so consider that rumor smashed.