This week, Mickey Mouse takes on a darker persona, more news publishers seek to de-list from Google, and IKEA becomes a hit on Facebook.

Mickey Mouse: darker than ever

"Cantankerous, cunning, and a traverser forbidding wastelands" are words that could not only describe Mickey Rourke, but also the new and darker Mickey Mouse, according to the New York Times. The newspaper reported that this drastic change of the Mouse's character is spurred on by Disney officials who are concerned that Mickey has become more of a "corporate symbol than a beloved character for the new generation of children".

This new incarnation of the $5 billion-worth Disney icon would be first revealed in the video game "Epic Mickey" for the Nintendo Wii. Disney hopes that this new Mickey would prove to be more relevant to today's children who favour the complex protagonists created by rivals Pixar and Nickelodeon, such as Spongebob Squarepants. (We're still scratching our heads on this one.)

The reinvention, however, won't see Mickey killing or doing evil things (haters of Michael Eisner, stop sniggering) in the game. "Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people,” said game developer Warren Spector to the New York Times, but was quick to add that the new Mickey won't be boring and stale as before. "I wanted him to be able to be naughty — when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish," he added.

Watch out, world. 
 

Google, watch us disappear.

Following Rupert Murdoch's threat to remove his news organisations from being indexed in Google News, two leading newspaper publishers – A H Belo, the publisher of The Dallas Morning News, and MediaNews Group, publisher of the Denver Post – are looking to do the same.

AH Belo and MediaNews have announced plans to block content locked behind pay walls from being indexed by Google News, but there would still be portions of the news that would remain free-to-read and displayed for Google users. This is in slight contrast to Murdoch's plan, which sees all his News Corp-produced content locked behind pay walls, and in doing so be blacked out from Google News.

MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton said that Google News will be blocked only from the paid content at various newspapers in Pennsylvania and California, while AH Belo is taking their time with the new policy, which only comes into effect at one of its daily newspapers in the next six months.

Google News currently allows users to see a headline and a snippet of content – typically the first paragraph – a feature newspaper publishers fear is enough for some readers. In response to this "content wars", Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said in a Bloomberg article that blocking Google from indexing sites of news publishers could only end in a "bad outcome" for both newspapers and the leading search engine.

IKEA launches Facebook viral tagging project

 Tag a Duktig Facebook photo with your name, and get a Duktig for your home – that, in a nutshell, is the latest online campaign launched by IKEA that has taken the Swedish Facebook community by storm.

 Created by advertising agency Forsman and Bodenfors for the Swedish furniture-maker, the marketing campaign has the agency creating a Facebook profile for unknown IKEA store manager Gordon Gustavsson, and over a two-week period, uploaded images from IKEA showrooms to his Facebook photo album.

The agency then informed the public that the first person to tag their name on the product in the pictures wins it. Needless to say, Gustavsson's rather lifeless showroom photos became the most popular photos online, and the viral nature of Facebook's news feed did the rest to promote the campaign to everyone in Sweden.

The video below explains the campaign: