BBC: Song-swappers settle out of court

"Seventeen Danes and one German have settled at a cost of several thousand euros each. In Italy 30 criminal cases are being brought against individuals."

And so it comes. Or rather goes—the end of the golden age of free music.

Global mobile phone sales soar

600m handsets in 2004? Maybe Russel Beattie will be right about billions of mobile users joining the internet. Mostly Chinese ;-)

Let users decide what's important and what's to be done in your company

This article tells of the layers of corporate waffle and loss making work middle manages seem to generate, but the one gem is this allegory:

An architect once designed a cluster of buildings. When asked by the landscape crew where to pave the sidewalks, he told them to plant grass between all the buildings, wait a year, then, after the occupants had worn the most useful paths, the architect told the landscape crew to pave the pathways that the occupants had created.

The comments and discuss features in blogs, where readers can leave feedback help to create the right lines, the right thinking, the right story. People aggregate and work out the best paths, ideas, deeper conversations happen, people actually think harder before they write. Relationships start between people and ideas. Other blogs link into these thoughts, stories, driving more traffic, and more thought... This is group thinking at its best. AKA internal, blogging systems, just like the one I run for the Government Office for the West Midlands.

eBay Hops Aboard The RSS Train

eBay: "...the feeds would be used to push special offers, promotions and system status messages via RSS."

Doesn't sound very interesting as a first step. Another site provides RSS feeds that are targeted at your search key words — much more useful, and its been out nearly a year.