Michael Arrington at TechCrunch threw out a big “told you so”, stating that the era of paid music downloads are coming to an end. Arrington thinks that QTrax,a new peer-to-peer music network that has signed all four major labels (EMI, SonyBMG, Universal, and Warner), is the next step to completely free, DRM-free music downloads. But, Mike, I’m responding to your “told you so” with a big “not so fast.”
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Domain tasting has clearly become a problem. It has become so bad, Network Solutions even devised a way to profit from “protecting” its customers from it. But according to a confidential informant to the DomainTools blog, Google is going to do something about making domain tasting less profitable.
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Fast Company will redesign Robert Scoble’s blog and begin selling ads on his behalf as part of his move to Fast Company. Scoble has long said that he doesn’t have ads on his blog because he doesn’t trust someone who is just in it for the money. But does having ads on one’s site really mean that they are just in it for the money? Does a blogger accepting money for advertising automatically create bias?
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Last night Digg announced that the algorithm that determines which stories get posted to the front page. It seems that the change is to penalize group voting - when a group of Digg friends all vote on the same story. Stories need to reach a certain point of “diversity” before being promoted to the front page. Mashable thinks that “Digg is a victim of its own success.”

“The illusion is that Digg is a system typically referred to as ‘direct democracy.’ As such, denizens of that democratic environment want a system they can count on to put across their agenda, especially the long time users of Digg. They’ve formed the online equivalent of coalition governments with their sizable friends list, so when they post something to the site, they can reasonably expect it to make front page if it is of a certain quality.” - Mashable

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IBM announced at Lotusphere an early version of Lotus Mashups. The tool is designed to let businesspeople quickly assemble web applications without the assistance of programmers. Lotus Mashups enables people to combine data from enterprise applications and web applications. Development is done with a browser-based visual tool and a set of pre-built widgets for displaying information. Lotus Mashups is scheduled for release in the middle of 2008.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Lotus, mashups

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It looks like Pownce has opened up to the world. Private invites are no longer needed to sign-up for the service. I don’t see an official annoucement anywhere, but the story has hit digg.

What’s Pownce? (from the Pownce site)
Pownce is a way to keep in touch with people and share stuff with them. Send files, links, events, and messages to people you know and have real conversations about them.

A lot of people have given Pownce a lot of flak about it’s usefulness. Personally, I don’t use Pownce.. I find it fine just to email files, links, events, and messages to my friends. But Betaflow has covered the site before… so I’ll keep up the tradition.

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After successfully suing Vonage and winning $120 million, Verizon has gone after Cox. In a suit filoed January 11, Verizon alleges that Cox has infinged on 8 patents related to delivering phone service over data communications networks. Verizon is seeking unspecified monitary damages and wants to block Cox from using the patents in the future.

The patents include U.S. Patent No. 6,104,711 for an “Enhanced Internet domain name server” to translate information from a public, packet-based network; and 6,282,574, “Method, server and telecommunications system for name translation on a conditional basis and/or to a telephone number.” The other concerned patents cover quality of service for communication sessions, enhanced signaling, network session management, and intercarrier signaling for connectivity between packet-based and circuit-switched networks.

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