I’m off to San Jose for Jeff Pulver’s VON conference, and the usual Bay Area side trips.

Jamie Lewis of the Burton Group has posted Ends and Means: Identity in Two Worlds, an outstanding overview of the digital identity situation. (via “Doc Searls”)

AP: "Free peer-to-peer music file-sharing has become larger than the multibillion-dollar recording industry, with a growth trend that has become ‘fundamentally unstoppable,’ a [California] state Senate committee exploring Internet piracy has been warned." I can’t even imagine what this statistic is supposed to mean. Clearly, P2P file sharing isn’t bigger in revenues than the recording industry. I can’t believe it’s bigger in number of users, since at least a third ...

Latest Tivo fave: Trigger Happy TV, a British program broadcast here on Comedy Central. A smarter Candid Camera. The segments are hit-or-miss, but they are short. Each episode has at least one or two huge laughs.

Great to see the Pulver.com folks (my partners for “Supernova”) have gotten blog religion!

You know people are desperate for positive tech stories when Sergey Brin’s joke about a potential Google IPO is big news.

62 outgoing emails today. Anything over 50 usually means I’m busy. And that generally means no time to blog. More about what’s keeping me busy soon!

MailBlocks is a new Web-based email service from Phil Goldman, one of the founders of WebTV. It’s slickly done, with a significantly better user experience than Yahoo! or Hotmail. Unlike Oddpost, it doesn’t require Internet Explorer, though there are still bugs in support for other browsers. Goldman wants to do to Web-based email what Google did to search. Mailblocks focuses on core functionality and performance, rather than blasting users with ...