Instapundit.com is celebrating its fifth birthday. The A-list media watching blog is written by law professor Glenn Reynolds in his “spare time”.

Korean super community Cyworld is launching in the US, according to PaidContent.org. The site will compete head-on with MySpace. It is very successful in Korea where a third of the population have signed up – and more than 90% of under-20s. It’s main revenue model is in selling virtual items (as in Second Life) which brings in $300,000 a day. It is making an average of $7 a user per year compared to MySpace’s $2.17.

PaidContent.org reports that FT.com may be considering dropping its subscription approach. It says The Guardian reported Pearson CEO Marjorie Scardino admitting that FT.com was finding it hard to keep up with the growing online debate as a subs site. New FT Group ceo Rona Fairhead was going to be “re-examining the model”, said Scardino. FT.com had 86,000 subscribers in June, 11% up on the same month last year.

According to PaidContent.org the Huffington Post blog site/business has just closed a $5m funding round. The money is apparently to be used to expand on a number of fronts. More from this Wired interview with founder Arianna Huffington.

The AOP reports that Future Publishing’s FastCar magazine is to share micropayments with users. The site plans to encourage users to upload video to the site and then to charge 20p for access, from which the clip owner will get 10%.

Wired has a crop of photos of what they say is a new wave of sophisticated crop circles appearing in the English countries. Picture gallerery here.

AOL’s online video plans are laid bare by PaidContent.org

According to WSJ.com AOL has finally confirmed it is to cut up to 5,000 jobs ,or a quarter of its global work force, within six months as the company restructures its business to draw more online advertising dollars.

The announcement, which was well trailled, came a day after the Time Warner Inc. unit said it would no longer charge high-speed Internet customers for email and other services.

An unknown number of European employees will still have jobs but with a different company as AOL looks to shed its Internet access businesses in France, Germany and the U.K. AOL currently has 3,000 access employees in Europe.”

Robert Scoble, the ex-Microsoft blogger, has an thought-provoking piece on “gestures” which I translate as clues in the text which could allow sites to personalise in a passive way, much more subtly than at present. Worth a read. He says Steve Gillmor is trying to write an algorithm.

The Lost Remote TV Blog reports on CNN’s decision to open up to user-generated content.

Called CNN Exchange and powered in part by Blip.tv, the section combines CNN.com’s blogs and message boards with user-submitted video, photos and comments, or I-Reports. “User-generated content has the potential to play a pivotal role in journalism whether it’s online or offline,” said Mitch Gelman, senior vice president and executive producer for CNN.com.

Note: Blip.tv is one of the video sites that was recommended at the BlogHer conference as an alternative to YouTube , according to Robert Scoble, following the recent fuss about its new Ts & Cs (giving YouTube rights over everything you post)