It appears that News Corp., the media giant owned by Australian mogul Rupert Murdoch, is trying to buy the entire Internet, since after last week’s offer for Dow Jones now comes an offer for Photobucket.

News Corp. made a $5 billion buyout offer last week to Dow Jones, the company which administers The Wall Street Journal, and is now on track of acquiring Photobucket, the second most visited photo-sharing site (after Flickr), according to an inside source familiar with the deal.

Although rumors have indicated bidding sums ranging from $ 250 million to $300 million, the anonymous source (which decided to keep its identity secure) says that the transaction has already been accomplished and that only small technical details remain to be perfected in order to make the deal public.

Photobucket, an Internet-startup that once wanted to rival with Flickr (currently ranked 42nd in the world) has more than 40 million registered users. In March, Photobucket Chief Executive Alex Welch hired the Lehman Brothers to manage a potential sale, stating that the site will reap its first profits in 2008 after the ownership modification. At that time, Welch estimated that Photobucket was worth about $300 million.

MySpace’s intention (at least for the moment it is only an intention rather than a certitude) to buy Photobucket would be quite odd, considering the spat the two have had in April, when MySpace began blocking video uploads from Photobucket. MySpace justified its decision by saying that Photobucket was violating its terms of service by embedding its own advertisements in the media files. After a week of discussions, the two companies resolved their differences and MySpace removed the block.