According to a story in today’s Financial Times, music companies are upset because, get this, customers are flocking to buy legal digital downloads. For several years, the record companies have complained about unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing. Now, they are finally generating significant revenues from users paying to receive their songs over the Net. And the labels’ response is to complain that prices must be set too low. There were other, ...

Some fun facts from the two keynotes I attended at the Wharton Technology Conference today: Lou D’Ambrosio of Avaya and Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! In 1998, the average Web search query was 1.2 words long; in 2004 was twice as long (2.5 words). Weiner (who heads up the search business at Yahoo!) made an insightful connection between this stat and the Long Tail phenomenon. Longer queries means more permutations. More ...

Who would have thought a historical baby-name database could be so compelling?

The Harvard Law Review (where I served as an editor some ten years ago) is leading an effort to prune back the excessive length of law review articles. Eleven of the top journals have

Very cool visualizations of relationships among photo-sharing users at FlickrLand.

14.2 billion video streams sent over the Net in 2004, a 79% increase over 2003, according to AccuStream iMedia. (via IT Facts) That doesn’t include the vast amount of P2P video downloads through BitTorrent and similar services. The videonet is coming faster than we think.

Susan Crawford explains why this week’s oral argument concerning the FCC’s broadcast flag ruling is important to the future of the Net.