According to numerous sources, Yahoo is eager to close a deal to acquire CafeMom, a social-networking and community site aimed at mothers, in a move aimed at turbocharging its often-meandering strategy in the important women’s space.

The price being offered, said sources, is hovering at $100 million, about the same amount Yahoo (YHOO) recently forked over for Associated Content.

The deal might not happen, of course, but several sources said the pair have been deep in negotiations in recent weeks.

CafeMom, sources said, has wanted to hold out for a higher price of closer to $200 million or more. Other interested buyers include Disney (DIS), sources added.

The New York-based CafeMom has been knocking around for a long time in Internet terms, morphing from a sister company owned by CMI Marketing called ClubMom back in the Web 1.0 days.

CMI, which was founded by Andrew Shue and Michael Sanchez, finally got two big fundings in 2008 totaling $17 million, both from Highland Capital Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Sanchez is CEO, but Shue–known for his BoomTown-approved role as the endearingly whiny Billy (But, Alllllliiiisoooonnnn…) on the original “Melrose Place”–is also deeply involved.

On its Web site, the company claims it has 6.7 million unique visitors on its main site and 18.7 million more on its network of affiliated sites, with 100 million page views.

CafeMom said on its Web site that it was profitable, and sources said its revenues were about $25 million to $30 million annually.

Moving from what was essentially a glorified bulletin board for moms, it has added content and other social-networking tools and games.

For example, it recently launched a blog and content platform named “The Stir”–no, really, it is called that.

A recent article on the sassy blog was titled “Parents Who Smuggle Babies Into R-Rated Movies: Ballsy or Crazy?”

(Ballsy, IMHO! You could go crazy enduring only “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore,” as I can testify. You need some “Salt” in your diet.)

This kind of content offering is all in Yahoo’s wheelhouse, of course, as it seeks to reinvigorate itself by bringing in new talent and brands.

In the women’s space, Yahoo has its Shine site, which is very pretty but in desperate need of a social boost that CafeMom can presumably provide.

Yahoo’s head of M&A Andrew Siegel–Andrew, don’t be scared of me! Call, I don’t bite! Only rarely, that is!–also reportedly took a strong look at Sugar, an innovative San Francisco women’s site. But the start-up declined to sell.

The women’s market is a big one for advertisers, with many competitors–from iVillage to AOL (AOL) to a recent effort by Demand Media to reach women using a site created with supermodel Tyra Banks.

Yahoo declined to comment, but a PR spokeswoman said in an email that “women are an important audience and our Shine site is very successful.”

Calling from Minneapolis, where he and Sanchez were visiting General Mills (GIS) and Target (TGT) about advertising deals, Shue declined to comment, though very charmingly (and very unlike the mumble-mouthed Billy).

So here’s a company that wants a piece of that: TicketFly, a New York-based start-up that just raised a $2 million Series A round led by High Peaks Venture Partners and Contour Venture Partners. The company had previously raised $1 million in convertible debt last year, via angels Howard Lindzon and Roger Ehrenberg, among others.

If TicketFly works, there’s a good chance you won’t ever know about it, because it’s a B2B business: Consumers fund the operation via surcharges on their tickets, but the real customers are the concert venues, which strike exclusive deals with ticketing companies.

So most of the features are designed with the venues and promoters in mind. TicketFly says it can help with Web site design and management, promoting shows on Twitter and Facebook, tracking sales data in real time, etc.

All of this sounds like fairly straightforward stuff, but the ticketing business is an old, archaic one. And Ticketmaster, the industry’s eight million-pound gorilla, now owned by Live Nation (LYV), is particularly slow-moving when it comes to all things tech. So some of this really will feel fresh for the concert guys.

More interesting are TicketFly’s plans, which involve giving venues the chance to sell tickets using the same dynamic pricing/yield management techniques hotels and airlines use: That is, prices for hot shows may shoot up, and if you want to see a band no one else wants to see, you may end up paying very little.

TicketFly has about 50 venues signed up so far, and most are fairly intimate places like Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., or the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis–the kinds of of places where you could see Nirvana before Nirvana became Nirvana.

They’re also the kinds of places that used be served by TicketWeb, another Web-based upstart that Ticketmaster acquired a few years back. No coincidence: TicketFly co-founder Andrew Dreskin used to run that company.

Here’s a little wayback machine: Nirvana at Maxwell’s in 1989. Audio and video quality is about as rough as you’d imagine:

Kindle will debut at Target’s (TGT) flagship store in Minneapolis, as well as 102 locations in South Florida this Sunday, with wider availability to follow.

This is Amazon’s (AMZN) first foray into the brick-and-mortar retail world and one evidently made under duress. Last week, Barnes & Noble (BKS) began distributing its Nook e-book reader through Best Buy (BBY), and, of course, Apple (AAPL) is now selling the iPad at its own retail stores.

With claim to about 90 percent of e-book sales, according to estimates by Credit Suisse Group AG (CS), the e-book market is Amazon’s to lose. As Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang noted earlier this year, the retailer may well see its e-book market share slip from 90 percent to 72 percent in 2010, thanks to some formidable new rivals.

“Near term, we suspect that the iPad and the new eBook agency pricing model, which requires that Amazon increase retail prices to be more consistent with Apple’s pricing, will provide Kindle with the most market share headwind,” Wang wrote. “Going forward, we can envision a scenario where Apple, Amazon, and Google eventually split the market. Therefore, we expect Amazon’s share of eBooks business to fall from 90 percent currently to about 35 percent over the next five years.”

That’s a steep decline–though 35 percent does seem extreme. Little wonder, then, that Amazon is willing to give up its sales exclusivity for the device in an effort to temper the projected loss of market share.

Last year, when executives from Cablevision (CVC) announced plans to turn their  paper’s Web site into a pay-to-play proposition, I dreamed up a way it could work: Maybe Long Island residents who wanted to peruse the paper’s classifieds would pay up. Nope.

Since the wall went up three months ago, only 35 people–as in not quite three dozen–have paid the $5-a-week fee for Web access, the New York Observer reports.

The Observer’s John Koblin quotes a Cablevision PR person who says that the “modest” pickup isn’t a surprise, but that’s some very unconvincing spin. Putting up a pay wall isn’t cheap or easy: Why bother if it only generates an extra $9,000?

Here’s the full statement from Cablevision/Newsday:

Millions of Cablevision customers in the New York tri-state area and 75% of Long Island households, including all Newsday home delivery subscribers, now have exclusive access to newsday.com at no additional charge. Internal research shows that Newsday’s Web site is an extremely popular new benefit to hundreds of thousands of Long Island Cablevision households. Given the number of households in our market that have access to Newsday’s Web site as a result of other subscriptions, it is no surprise that a relatively modest number have chosen the pay option.

As PaidContent notes, Cablevision can also argue that the real idea behind the pay wall is that it’s supposed to make existing subscribers feel like they’re getting something of real value (advertisers too, supposedly). But it’s hard to argue that online access is a “value-add” if only 35 people value it.

It’s also hard to argue that Cablevision’s problems offer any clue about the prospects of the New York Times’s (NYT) coming pay wall. Because the Times is a different beast from any other paper in the country.

I would be interested, though, in learning how the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune did with “Access Vikings Premium,” a $20-a-year pay wall it put up around most stories about the home team last season.

I could see the thinking behind this one, which showed up around the same time Brett Favre joined the team. And this was the year to try it, since the Vikings had a great season until they blew the NFC Conference game, as is their wont.

But in my personal one-man focus group, the pay wall only served to keep me from visiting StarTribune.com at all. I see now that the paper seems to have dropped the wall around content it used to ask me to pay for, so perhaps I wasn’t the only one. I’ve asked the paper for more details.

UPDATE: Strib spokesman Ben Taylor gives me a no comment, which apparently has been the paper’s stance on this for many months. MinnPost’s David Brauer explains, while noting that three of the paper’s biggest traffic days have been spurred by Vikings news.

From the Strib’s posting on Journalism Jobs (via Minnpost): “Enthusiasm for communicating political news on many different platforms–from print to online to mobile to social networking media–is essential.”

First: Good to know that even bankrupt papers are still hiring. That’s my good news tidbit for the day.

Second: The social-networking part may sound like a novelty, but I think in the not-too-distant future, this is simply going to be a core requirement for any reporting job, like having a driver’s license.

In an investment note issued this morning, Munster estimated that the company sold 750,000 iPhones over the weekend–25 percent fewer than the one million units of the iPhone 3G model Apple sold during the launch of that device last July, but 50 percent more than the 500,000 he originally predicted.

“The only true benchmark for judging the launch of the iPhone 3G S will be the time it takes Apple to sell 1 million units. Apple sold 1 million 1st generation iPhones in 74 days and 1 million iPhone 3G units in 3 days. We are uncertain whether or not Apple will announce the 1 millionth iPhone 3G S; regardless, we are increasingly confident in our 5 million iPhone unit estimate for the June 09 quarter following the price drop of the iPhone 3G from $199 to $99 in early June and the launch for the iPhone 3G S, where interest in the device surpassed our expectations.”

A few other points worth noting from Munster’s note. The analyst surveyed 256 customers at Apple (AAPL) stores in New York and Minneapolis over the weekend about their preferred OS, the size of the iPhone they were purchasing and the phones from which they were upgrading, among other things (see table below; click to enlarge). In the 256, he found a mix of 66 percent Mac users and 34 percent PC, similar to what he found last year (61 percent Mac, 39 percent PC).

Of those surveyed, 43 percent purchased the high-end 32-gigabyte iPhone 3GS, less than the 66 percent of buyers who purchased the 16GB iPhone 3G last year. And 56 percent were upgrading from an old iPhone–up from 38 percent last year. “We believe this shows Apple is developing brand loyalty not enjoyed by other mobile phone makers,” Munster notes.

“At the outset of the company’s iPhone initiative, one of Apple’s goals was to develop the kind of brand loyalty it has developed among Mac and iPod customers, and we believe they are succeeding thus far. As the footprint expands, and loyalty expands as well, Apple will increasingly enjoy a base of customers who regularly upgrade to the newest version of the mobile phones the company releases in what appears to be an annual cycle.”

This is the second time Jammie Thomas-Rasset has been ordered to pay the music labels for her use of file-sharing services. In a 2007 trial, a jury originally decided that she would owe $9,250 per song.

It’s unclear what prompted the jury to bump up her tab in the retrial, but it’s going to be academic anyway. The industry is making noises about settling, and 32-year-old Thomas-Rasset, who lives in rural Minnesota, doesn’t have $2 million lying around. In her words: “The only thing I can say is good luck trying to get it, because you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”

Lawsuits like the ones the labels filed against Thomas-Rasset haven’t worked: Music piracy has continued unabated, and while Apple (AAPL) sells about $2 billion worth of songs a year on iTunes, the overall market for digital music is flattening. That’s why the lawsuits are supposed to be relics of the past, replaced by a new strategy whereby music labels convince Internet service providers to help them police piracy.

But while the industry floated the concept six months ago, it has yet to get a single cable company or telco to sign on. And even if they do, there’s not a whole lot of incentive for the likes of Comcast (CMCSA) or AT&T (T) to really crack down on music pirates, who don’t take up much bandwidth and don’t steal anything the pipe guys care about.

Here’s why: The yet-to-be-described subsidy the papers plan to offer to Kindle DX buyers who agree to long-term subscriptions will only be available to a fraction of subscribers–those who can’t get home delivery of the print edition.

From Amazon’s press release: “The New York Times Company (NYT) and Washington Post Company (WPO) are launching pilots with Kindle DX this summer. The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post will offer the Kindle DX at a reduced price to readers who live in areas where home-delivery is not available and who sign up for a long-term subscription to the Kindle edition of the newspapers.”

Since the New York Times is available for home delivery throughout most of the U.S., that means that the majority of its American readers will have to pay full freight–$489–for the gadget. I suppose you could circumvent this if you lived, in say, Minneapolis, by agreeing to subscribe to the Boston Globe instead, which you can’t get delivered at home there. But what’s the point?

My assumption here is that the terms were set by the Times and the Post, which presumably don’t want to cut into print circulation. This makes sense if you’re focused on the very, very short term, since the print editions–both via subscriptions and the ads they contain–still deliver the majority of newspaper revenue for both companies.

Then again, that business isn’t going gangbusters for any of the papers involved. The Times, for instance, spent the early morning hours today hammering out a labor deal that will allow it keep the Globe in business.

The easy way to improve the offer: Copy my corporate colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, and offer a bundle online/offline subscription. But once you start doing that, you get into interesting billing issues, which is going to be fodder for another post.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll try it. Since everyone involved is careful to point out that this is an “experiment,” etc., it’s possible that the papers could reconsider the offer sooner than later. Which I hope they do: It’s a nice-looking device, and it would be a shame if no one ever used it.

Although we did not raid the offices of Silicon Alley Insider and “steal” Peter Kafka, as the fanciful SAI kingpin Henry Blodget alleges–had it been a raid, BoomTown would have properly hog-tied Blodget so he could not make such spurious allegations!–it is true that SAI’s current managing editor (pictured here) will be coming to work for us at AllThingD.com soon.

Indeed, Walt Mossberg and I, as well as the rest of the ATD team, are thrilled that Peter is coming onboard at the end of October. He will write a daily still-unnamed new media blog from New York City.

Walt and I have long wanted to bring in someone located on the East Coast and away from the echo chamber that Silicon Valley can be, because we both feel the ongoing digital revolution is taking place over a number of key industries all over this country and the world.

Peter was our first choice and has been on my must-read list since I began this blog. He is sharp, witty, confident and has the kind of reporting and writing chops that we think are key to giving readers high-quality, standards-based content they can trust.

With extensive connections across the media, advertising, entertainment and tech sectors, Peter will be doing original reporting, getting scoops, doing interviews, making videos and providing much needed and clear-headed analysis that he is so well known for.

Peter has worked at SAI since mid-2007. The first hire at the start-up tech business analysis site, he has focused on enterprise and beat reporting, as well as breaking news.

Previously, he spent 10 years as a reporter and editor at Forbes and Forbes.com covering media and technology. There he launched two tech columns, coordinated the video staff and represented Forbes on industry panels and in TV appearances for CNN, BBC and CNBC.

Peter was also a staff reporter with City Business in Minneapolis and a staff writer for the Minnesota Real Estate Journal in Bloomington from 1993 to 1997. Earlier, he was a stringer with the Milwaukee Journal and the Milwaukee Sentinel in Madison, Wis.

He holds a bachelor of arts from the University of Wisconsin and resides in Brooklyn, NY.

More importantly, Peter is a newly-minted father, which should give him more practice in prolonged sleep deprivation needed for his blogging.

He will begin at ATD on Oct. 27.

Along with Walt and me, Peter joins senior news editor John Paczkowski, author of the rocking Digital Daily column, who formerly wrote the award-winning blog, “Good Morning Silicon Valley” at the San Jose Mercury News, and Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Boehret, who writes the most excellent weekly Mossberg Solution column.

We hope you are as thrilled as we are that Peter is coming soon to the ATD site.

(And if you want a little taste of Peter’s work, here’s a post he did yesterday on an appearance by Time Warner’s Jeff Bewkes at the Goldman Sachs media conference and another on Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. [News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and of this Web site].)