TechCrunch UK has an interesting rumor on this slow news day for Thanksgiving here in the U.S.: News Corp is looking into buying the business social networking site LinkedIn. News Corp of course already own the biggest social networking site, MySpace, but has no doubt heard all the hype about Facebook this past year and needs something to try and stop its momentum.

A purchase of LinkedIn would give News Corp an entirely new dynamic in its social networking schema. While RapLeaf’s data from a few weeks ago showed that almost all of the social networks are dominated by women at nearly a 2 out of 3 margin, LinkedIn has a demographic that is just about the exact opposite, about 2/3rds male. LinkedIn users being mostly mature and professionals (read: wealthier), also would bring a different advertising niche to the table.

All of that being said, if News Corp is planning on buying LinkedIn with the intention of merging it with MySpace what would be a truly awful idea. While I bitch a lot that MySpace is basically a cesspool of fake profile, advertisements, and hideous design, in reality I know that there is little they can do to corral all of that at this point, MySpace is simply too big – and still growing. Bringing LinkedIn into the MySpace fold wouldn’t clean up MySpace either, it would simply overwhelm LinkedIn users with the crud – ‘Hey is this my boss John McDonald’s profile or is this the profile for McDonald’s new $3 Cheeseburger?’.

There’s been a lot of talk that Facebook’s new target in the social sphere is the LinkedIn (professional) market. They recently updated their ‘Looking for’ area to include the more business-appropriate ‘Networking’ rather than ‘Random play’ for those users who sign up with clear business networking intentions (those not in college). I’m not sure Facebook can pull this off either until they implement their rumored segmenting different networking into different groups feature.

With Facebook making a move for that market, New Corp would probably be smart to buy LinkedIn – just please keep it separate from MySpace.