Ever since I read last week about EMI CEO Alain Levy declaring, "the CD as it is right now is dead," I’ve been trying to decide what I think about it. Do I agree? (Do I care?)

It’s certainly not a ridiculous thing to say. We’re always hearing about how CD sales are falling, and Tower Records just went under–both ominous signs for an industry that’s constantly telling us how forlorn it is.

But wait. See what happened? The same old problems with the industry are now being blamed on the poor little compact disc.

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The official Google blog today announced that it would release an
exclusive video from the makers of the incredibly popular Diet Coke and
Mentos act. Their new video is available for viewing and includes a
"thanks to Mentos and Coca-Cola" at the end while flashing the
companies’ website urls. At the end of the video, another video immediately begins (one might go as far as to call it an "ad" *gasp*)
explaining that users can submit their own videos through Coca-Cola.com
to be entered into a contest.

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Reuters reports that out of the United States 220 million cellphone users, approximately 88
million send text messages frequently and about 46 million have
downloaded a ringtone. Accordingly,
65 billion
text messages were sent in the U.S. alone through the first half of
this year. That is nearly twice as many as were sent during the same
period last year.

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Not surprisingly, Hell.com failed to have any bids placed above the $2.3 million reserve set by the seller at a live auction on Friday. Bids were apparently above $500,000 but still a far cry from the $2.3 million minimum. Personally, I would have taken the $500,000, especially considering the site is only getting around 5,000 hits a day with whatever hell-driven community is there (which would translate to significantly less than $500,000 in ad revenue by practically any calculation). But some other names did sell:

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The Economist has an article (subscription required) about South Africans using cellphones as banks. About half a million South Africans now use their mobile phones as a bank. Apparently, while most South Africans do not have traditional bank accounts, most do have mobile phones. And a company called Wizzit (among others) is taking advantage of the situation.

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If you’ve been following the e360 v. Spamhaus case, you’ve probably heard that the Judge refused to order Spamhaus’s domain name suspended. If you haven’t been following it, here’s a short recap. American e360 filed suit against British Spamhaus for calling at least some of e360’s "opt-in marketing" activites "spamming" (you say "tomato . . ." ) and blacklisting them as part of the anti-spammer’s efforts to protect consumers and institutions. Spamhaus didn’t show up at the trial because it said a US court had no jurisdiction, and the judge entered a default judgment in favor of e360 in the amount of $11.7 million(!). When Spamhaus gave no indication it intended to pay, e360 asked the judge to order Spamhaus’s domain name pulled. The judge, as I was saying at the top of the paragraph, said no.

Good news for Spamhaus and everyone who hates spam, right? Right?!

Well, yes and no.

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The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reports that Hell.com will go up for sale today, Friday, October 27, 2006. Through some sort of live auction format, the domain is expected to draw bids of more than $1 million or so they say. The organizers of these type of auctions claim that the supposedly "hot" market for domain names is on the rise due to an increase in Internet advertising via search giants Google & Yahoo. Interestingly enough, Jim Bumgardner, owner of Heaven.com, says his ads on Heaven.com only get him around $5 or $6 per day.

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The ACLU filed a suit Monday, the latest in its ongoing challenge of COPA, the Child Online Protection Act. Frankly, I’m surprised at how little attention this is getting–particularly in the tech world. (It hasn’t been completely ignored; here’s a helpful summary.) Maybe it’s because of how the issue seems to be framed: “oh, here we go again, the ACLU wants to make sure kids get all the porn they want.” If so, that’s too bad. Nobody in the suit is arguing that kids should have access to sexually explicit material. In fact, the ACLU proposes measures it says will actually be more effective in restricting kids’ online access to objectionable material. Whenever two important interests conflict–here, protecting children from harmful material and constitutionally protected free speech–it’s crucial to be careful in the laws we adopt.

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Google’s recruiting process is notoriously tedious. Experiences of job candidates range from those who had to pass through a dozen or more in-person interviews to those with years of work experience who were rejected after disclosing their less-than-stellar college grades.
But Google’s growth is causing the search giant to find talent faster. The company is hoping to make the process less grueling for potential new hires while matching the right job for the right candidate more effectively.

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Is Google the "government of the Internet?" So complains David Milman–chief executive of Rescuecom, a company that lost a lawsuit to Google over trademark and search terms–in this New York Times article. In terms of its seeming invulnerability from the consequences of living life on the Internet’s bleeding egde, fighting Google has indeed seemed impossible.

Google has a policy of aggressively fighting lawsuits in an effort
to shape fledgling Internet legal precedent in ways that will be
favorable to the company in the future. So far it has been rather
brash, but also remarkably successul. You get the idea that Milman
isn’t the only one who thinks of Google as invincible. But the company
may be facing its biggest legal challenge yet: will YouTube be the
hurdle that takes the swagger out of Google?

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