MC Hammer 2.0: Web Entrepreneur?

MC Hammer hasn't topped the music charts since the early 1990s, but the former rap star says he has another hit in him _ only this time around he'll produce it as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Hammer, whose real name is Stanley Burrell, is choreographing a new career as co-founder and chief strategy officer of Menlo Park-based DanceJam.com.

The Web site, scheduled to debut in mid-January, will try to upstage YouTube and become the Internet's hub for sharing and watching dance videos. DanceJam then hopes to make money by grabbing a piece of the rapidly growing Internet advertising market, which is expected to rake in $27.5 billion in 2008, according to eMarketer.

Due to debut later this month, DanceJam will allow users to share and watch their own dance videos.

If the website is a hit, it could help Hammer's finances - he went bankrupt in 1996 with debts of almost $14m (£7m).

Despite earning an estimated $33m, Hammer - real name Stanley Burrell - quickly spent all the money, and more, on an opulent lifestyle of private jets, luxury cars and a gold-drenched Californian mansion.

As his music career and finances fell apart, Hammer reinvented himself as a preacher and TV presenter.

Now 45, Hammer told the Associated Press news agency: "There is no high-tech lingo or business strategy that you can talk that is above my head. I breath this stuff."