ReadWriteWeb

Personalized iPad magazine application Zite has confirmed that it has been acquired by CNN. The sales price is rumored to be in the $20 to $25 million range. Zite will not be branded exclusively to CNN and will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the news network.

It is an interesting play by CNN. Zite is a powerful news reading iPad app with a lot of excellent functionality. It operates almost like a "Pandora for news" that gives users serendipitous resources based on inputted interest and usage. Yet, outside of being a cool iPad app, Zite is driven by some interesting technology that could be of great use to CNN.

The 112th US Congress, which will run for the next two years, will kick-off with swearing in tomorrow at noon EST. For the first time in history, the first day at least will be live broadcast on giant social network Facebook, according to an announcement CNN says Republican leadership will make today. It's big news, but it also raises interesting questions about media and politics in the current era.

Specifically, the live streaming will be done on the Republicans' page for PledgeToAmerica. When the Obama inauguration was live broadcast in 2009, the video appeared on CNN.com but was powered by Facebook Connect, which allowed viewers to see comments posted exclusively by their Facebook friends, if they so chose. CNN said at the time that 5.3 million video streams of that event were delivered.

CNN host Rick Sanchez has more than 140,000 followers on Twitter but is now out of a job. The controversial but creative TV personality interacted live on the air with Twitter and Facebook users, but it was good old fashioned radio where he made statements about Jewish control over the media that lost him his job today.

Sanchez's popular Twitter account handle is named @RickSanchezCNN, but he'll be able to change that without losing his thousands of followers. He hasn't changed it yet, nor made any kind of statement over that public channel, but this unique intersection of traditional media and new media at a time of professional upheaval presents some interesting questions.

It's been about 90 days since the f8 Facebook Conference and the debut of OpenGraph, a platform consisting of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API. Every new vehicle needs time for a shakedown drive, to bang out the kinks and to see if users can make something of it.

In point of fact, users have made something of it. fbLike has compiled a list of six OpenGraph success stories, and possible models, for use of the Facebook platform, and were good enough to share it with ReadWriteWeb's readers.

The words "mobile entertainment" are so overused that they fail to capture any real meaning anymore, but in 1999 Mobitv was one of the only companies trying to bring video to mobile phones. Today, most consumers would recognize Mobitv as the company that brings live CBS Sports coverage and NBA games to our iPhones. What many don't understand, is that in order to get all that great content onto our tiny devices, somebody had to convince Sprint, AT&T, US Cellular and Verizon to play along, while at the same time licensing enough high quality television content to make it a worthwhile service - President and Co-founder Paul Scanlan is that somebody.

Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it - the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it's raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures, real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing.

Tonight the Outside.in site told me about a new real-estate valuation report for the neighborhood I just bought a house in, a city permit request by a local college planing to subdivide a big residential lot on the beautiful old street I walk my dogs on and some cool jobs in the neighborhood. What more could I ask for? Long term viability and an expanded staff for a service like this? That sounds great.

CNN.com, one of the top 25 websites in the US, just announced a radical redesign of its service at a press event in New York City. The new CNN.com homepage will be split up into three parts. On the left, CNN will now highlight breaking news stories, the middle section will feature older stories and a 'highlights' section, and the right sidebar will be customizable with personalized weather and sports scores. Right beneath the fold, the new CNN will feature a list of 'editor's choice' stories - similar to the NYTimes's 'Inside NYTimes.com' section. The new site will go live next Monday.

While Ashton Kutcher and CNN are trying to be the first to hit 1 million followers on Twitter, Joseph Frieschel, an inconspicuous Australian MD, is quickly catching up. Frieschel only opened his Twitter account last night, but he already has over 200,000 followers. How can this be? Well, it looks like the anonymous members of the infamous 4chan imageboard didn't like the idea of either Kutcher or CNN breaking the 1 million follower barrier before they got a chance to make their presence felt.

Today Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. As several million people attended the inauguration in Washington D.C., Facebook and CNN invited the rest of the world to watch the moment online. Online visitors to CNN.com were able to use its video player to watch the live broadcast coverage of the event. We also saw what has be one of the most brilliant examples of the real-time web in action: next to the video, the Facebook status updates of those watching streamed by in the sidebar.