Back in July, when writing about GetGlue’s partnership with HBO, I told CEO Alex Iskold that if they struck a deal to get Mad Men stickers from AMC, I’d be on board. Well, he went out and did just that. So here I am, loading up GetGlue.

And AMC is hardly the only new partner that GetGlue is announcing today. Disney, HGTV, Discovery, and, in what may be a first for news programming, MSNBC is on board as well. Each of these companies will now have special stickers that users can accumulate when they check-in watching any of their shows.

To be honest, it’s surprising how many big name networks and studios are jumping on board with this idea, which, on the face of it, sounds a little silly. But the key isn’t really the stickers — they’re just a lure for some users. The key is the metrics behind them. And GetGlue is quickly building those up.

The service had 8 million unique ratings and check-ins during the month of August, Iskold says. And they now have over 600,000 users on GetGlue — a number which has seen 20x growth in 2010. “Social TV as a market is moving very rapidly,” Iskold says. Rivals Miso, Clicker, Philo, and Tunerfish undoubtedly agree.

But anyway, back to the important thing here: the Mad Men stickers. On top of the regular show sticker you’ll get when you check-in watching the show, GetGlue also has five other “hidden” Mad Men stickers (above) that you can unlock by checking-in and writing a certain phrase. I’ll give you one of them. If you check-in with the phrase “I want to be Don Draper” or “I want Don Draper” (depending on your preference, of course), you’ll unlock a special Draper sticker.

GetGlue has been doing these types of hidden stickers for some time now to reward true fans of various shows. Each of these is unlocked with a phrase or word that real fans are likely to utter at some point when using GetGlue. “It’s fun and it’s designed to prove that you’re a true fan,” Iskold says.

And true fans are proving to be valuable to the network partners as well. For example, certain stickers for certain shows you can only earn when that show is being aired live. This obviously entices people to watch the shows with commercials, but it also shows who the real die-hards are. Again, this is all about metrics.

Another cool partnership GetGlue is doing is with Disney for the upcoming Tron: Legacy film. There are three different stickers you can earn depending on if you check-in watching the trailer, see the movie on opening weekend, or see the movie in the first 30 days of it opening. Again, this can help entice users to see the movie early — and even often.

BanxCorp this morning announced that it has filed a federal antitrust complaint against nine firms, including Dow Jones & Co, Fox News, The New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.

The company alleges (PDF) that the nine companies engage in “unlawful per se horizontal market division, customer allocation, and price fixing agreements” with its competitors in the market for bank rate websites throughout the United States.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, and accuses the firms of entering into “a conspiracy in restraint of trade and forming a cartel” with their competitor Bankrate.com together with approximately a hundred competing bank rate website operators including some of the largest media conglomerates in the United States.

The complaint estimates that the damages caused by the “price-fixing cartel” may exceed $500 million, to be trebled under the antitrust statute.

BanxCorp, which operates competing bank rate website BanxQuote.com, indicated that other members of the ‘cartel’ may also be joined.

Currently included: Dow Jones & Company and Fox News Network (both News Corp.-owned), The New York Times Company, CNBC, Cable News Network, MSNBC Interactive New, AOL, LendingTree and Move.

MSNBC spokesperson Gina Stikes says that the new Facebook account will only send updates for the biggest stories to break (you can still use its other feeds if you want to receive every story to come from the service). The page is obviously still quite new (it only has 645 fans right now), but you can expect that the grow quickly.

Just how quickly is the big question, though: we’ll have to wait to see if MSNBC will be able to leverage its large community on Twitter to establish its Facebook page.  In any case, it’s managed to take ownership of the term “breaking news” across a large swath of the web, which is no small feat.

Update: Yep. Now suspended.

Update 2: MSNBC is now saying that the account was never in their control in the first place. It was previously sending out MSNBC headlines, but then today went off the deep end, obviously. So I guess this is a lesson in controlling your online brand.

Even though they haven’t really found a big audience yet, hyperlocal news sites are becoming a hot commodity. In June, AOL bought Patch for $7 million, and today MSNBC acquired EveryBlock. EveryBlock was previously funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, which ended in June. The five employees will now work at MSNBC.

The price was not disclosed, but like the Patch acquisition, it is not an audience acquisition. Rather it is a hyperlocal platform play which MSNBC can now plug into its site and push in a major way. EveryBlock is a hyperlocal news aggregator, bringing in geo-specific feeds from neighborhood blogs, Flickr, Yelp, Craigslist, and elsewhere to give readers a picture of what is going on in their town or neighborhood.

EveryBlock currently covers only about 15 cities in the U.S. and comScore estimates its U.S. audience to be only 143,000 unique visitors a month (July, 2009). In contrast, competitor Outside.in attracts 800,000 unique visitors in the U.S. These are relatively small numbers, but these services do a good job of collecting neighborhood news without the expense of actually reporting it.

CBSNews.com is undergoing a major overhaul and redesign of its sites to make them easier to navigate, more visually compelling, faster and more focused on driving users to content.

The new home page features a rotating list of top stories on the left, next to the list of the latest and most important headlines. CBS News programs, as well as the latest videos, photo galleries and blogs, are all highlighted on the page. CBS News also plugs its program sites, including Evening News, Face the Nation, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and Sunday Morning, on its homepage. CBS says that the company applied technology from its sister site, CNET.com, to deliver pages from its servers to users’ screens more rapidly. Dan Farber, CNET’s editor-in-chief, oversaw the redesign.

Here’s what CBSNews.com used to look circa 2000 (left) and currently (right):

As you can see from the screenshot of the new design at the top of the post, this is a big improvement. The additional of images definitely make the site more aesthetically pleasing and easier to scroll through. But it seems that the new site is now a little too cluttered with pictures. Farber says the news site has undergone two major redesigns over the past ten years. A small percentage of random visitors to CBSNews.com will see the new look for pages on the site. CBS Says the site is still a work in progress and is undergoing changes and upgrades frequently.

This new redesign may be part of an effort to catch up to ABCnews.com and MSNBC.com (NBC’s news site). CBSNews.com only drew 3.2 million unique visitors in U.S. in April compared to 4.4 million for ABCnews.com and 30.7 million for MSNBC.com, according to ComScore.

Citizen journalism seems all the rage these days, with normal people breaking news to the world with their mobile phones and portable computers. News sites like GroundReport and CNN’s iReport are offering users outlets for their eyewitness stories, and with emerging mobile broadcasting products like Twitter and Qik, we’re only going to see the trend continue to grow.

In keeping with the trend, MySpace has partnered with NBC News and MSNBC.com to launch its “Decision ’08 Convention” contest, which will offer two MySpace users the chance to attend and report from either the Republic or Democratic national convention.

From the press release:

The videos should be less than two minutes long and answer one of the following questions: “Why do you vote?” “Why are you the best person for this job?” “How will you stand out in the crowd and get the scoop no one else can?” The submission period closes on Wednesday, July 16.

Judges will narrow the submissions down to five candidates, who will be voted on by the MySpace community. The two contestants with the highest number of votes will be sent to the national conventions, where they’ll serve as reporters representing the MySpace community. The contest is being orchestrated through MySpace’s Impact portal, which offers users a place to learn and get involved with politics, community service, and eco-friendly projects.

“Consider this: If the police caught Brett Favre running a dolphin-fighting ring out of his pool, where dolphins with spears attached to their foreheads fought each other to the death, would they bust him? Of course not. They would get his autograph, commend him on his tightly-spiraled forward passes, then bet on one of his dolphins.”

Al Sharpton has undoubtedly had some pretty tantalizing soundbites over the years but even I would have double-checked this one before quoting it and I’m not even a “real” newsperson.

MSNBC mistakes a ‘fake Al Sharpton’ blog for the real thing [CNET News.com]