Thursday saw Microsoft Corp. launching gossip site Wonderwall. com, which basically is a scrolling wall of star photos and news aimed to provide users the feel of flipping through a celebrity magazine.

Wonderwall, which has been produced by Hollywood based BermanBraun is being expected by MSN to motivate users to spend quite a lot time on the site than they have elsewhere on the Web portal. It is also being hoped by the company that it will let the users to come up with innovative approaches to advertising.

Internet companies has been experiencing a lot of problems while increasing Web advertising, as advertisers paid quite less per spot than they did on television.

However, it should be noted here Wonderwall will fight a tough competition against many other celebrity news sites, like TMZ. com which is a joint venture of Telepicture Productions and AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc (TWX. N).

Wonderwall is aiming to capitalize on high interest in entertainment news. It was reported by tracking firm Comscore recently, "84 percent of Web users visit an entertainment site every month, which is more than visit always popular social networking sites."