A consortium of investors, led by Barry Rosenstein’s Jana Partners, is trying to seize control of the CNET Networks board.

Jana has joined Alex Interactive Media and the VC firm Spark Management in an effort to increase the size of the board from eight directors to 13. The group plans to nominate seven people at the next shareholders’ meeting.

The group has also filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court, to stop CNETfrom rejecting its proposals.

In a press release issued today after the New York Times published a story about the dispute, Rosenstein said, “This effort is about taking an underperforming company and increasing shareholder value by building on its top-notch editorial talent and premier internet assets.” .

If traffic to a candidate’s web site is any indication of the candidates popularity in the Iowa caucuses, then Barack Obama and Ron Paul will be the winners of their parties caucuses after the votes are tallied this evening.

Web site traffic statistics provided by Alexa show Obama with a clear lead in the Democratic contest over second place finisher Hillary Clinton. John Edwards lands in third place with Joe Biden taking a distant fourth and Christopher Dodd finishing fifth. Bill Richardson’s doesn’t even break the top 100,000 websites, so there is little data on Alexa about their traffic trends.

The Federal Trade Commission today approved Google’s $3.1 acquisition of DoubleClick, clearing the way for tremendous growth in the company’s online advertising revenues.

Microsoft and consumer privacy organizations had opposed the deal, arguing that it would create an advertising monopoly.

Writing the first draft of history is always perilous.

In September 2004, in a story about a then new lawsuit that accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing the idea for Facebook from fellow Harvard students, The Boston Globe wrote: “There isn’t much money at stake.”

Oops.

Today Facebook is valued on paper at $15 billion or so, making Zuckerberg’s 20 percent stake worth $3 billion. The 23-year-old is well on his way to becoming the second richest Harvard dropout in history, behind Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.

Despite losing to Microsoft in its bid for a piece of Facebook, Google isn’t giving up on social networks.

The behemoth of search is partnering with other tech companies and social networks to develop a competing approach called OpenSocial. The open-source technology will enable developers to write applications that can be used on many sites, including partners in the project, such as LinkedInand Friendster.

Google News has begun hosting news from four major wire services: Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press.

The company explained the new feature on its blog as an effort to eliminate duplication that occurred when many news outlets ran the same wire story.

“Instead of 20 ‘different’ articles (which actually used the exact same content), we’ll show the definitive original copy and give credit to the original journalist,” reads the blog posting.

Google, which last year purchased YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion, has unveiled a plan to make money from the site.

Ads now appear at the bottom of some videos, eventually disappearing if the users don’t click on them. In an approach similar to Google’s AdSense program, selected content providers receive a portion of the revenues.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wants to shift the internet power base.

Last week his for-profit company, Wikia, announced its purchase of Grub, a web crawler. Grub will be incorporated into Wikia’s search engine, which, like Wikipedia, will seek editorial input from a broad web audience.