Engadget has Creative Zen Vision about Microsoft "breaking some new ground" with a… Battlebot (?!) walking around with Sony Ericsson's new W600 Walkman Phone and chatting up how the Nintendo Revolution won't support HD.

AdJab covers AutoTrader's attacks, on Heinz one-liners, marooned on Gilligan's Island and then

From the Web 2.0 conference:

Hank Barry just went off on fighting the INDUCE ACT, following Mark Cuban's comments last night.

Here is the MP3 of his comments.

Google has put up a sensible set of principles on how software, and the companies that put out software, should behave on the Internet. The problem is that the people who make this software don't care about their reputations, let alone the reputations of the industry. No, that is way to high-concept for these slim buckets.

This whole thing started, of course, when Limewire and Kazaa started bundling spyware with their wildly popular P2P software. These products would watch what you were looking at on the Internet and present you with ads (i.e you're on JetBlue they show you an ad for Southwest). They might set your home page to their portal, or they might hijack the default setting for when you type in a URL wrong.

Perhaps the biggest problem these things cause is not the unwanted ads. They are poorly written, are memory hogs and are highly un-installable. They eat up your computer's resources to the point at which Windows just stops working.

To solve the problem you have to just reinstall Windows every three months—that is what I do.

The market will correct this problem. Users are getting savvy and they are learning to not load P2P software. Limewire has such a horrible reputation that they just yesterday introduced a "spyware" free version of their software.

Over time—and this is highly unlikely—if Microsoft can't solve this problem people are just going to move to the Mac or Linux platforms. I know just yesterday I installed a Lindows machines next to my new rocketship from ABSComputing.com. I'm thinking about using that machine for blogging and email just to avoid all the problems with Windows.

Thanks for the concept Google, and it's not bad—it's noble in fact. However this is one problem even Google can't solve except by being the finest example of how a company should behave on the planet. You are doing a great job at that.

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer please take note: two kids who were nobody a decade ago are now the shinning example of leadership in your industry. They are not only trying to run their business, but they are trying to help you fix your business.

I think the torch was just passed.

As we all know Howard Stern has been under the gun, and the chances of his show remaining on the air in its current format are slim to none. The FCC fines are getting bigger and bigger, and at some point Viacom will have to give in and either drop Stern or risk losing their license.

Now, everyone has talked about Stern moving to digital radio, and that is great way to get around the FCC issues. However, not many people own these radios yet, and although Stern would increase sales it would take years.

If I was advising Stern I would tell him to just move the show online (or move it online and to satellite radio). People will have no problem downloading 20-30 meg files of his show and listening to them on their iPods or on their computer.

Sound crazy?

Well, it might, but right now I have the last two weeks of the Stern show—commercial free—on my laptop hard drive. I listen to the Stern show on my schedule, sometimes on planes and sometimes late at night. I catch up recent shows when I'm on Jetblue and I'm listening to his first show on WXRK from November 18th, 1985 right (back in the days when Stern would spin some record during the show). I was 15 years old when he moved to WXRK and we used to listen to him in the morning on the way to high school.

It turns out there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people online trading tapes of Stern today. It is a bit of pain in the neck to get to these files, but once you do it is pretty easy to download previous shows. Heck, some people post a month's worth of shows at a time (500-600 megs, might take 12 hours).

Portable, uncensored and replayable Stern is an amazing advancement. Stern, I believe, would be able to get more than a million subscribers to his show online at the rate of $20-30 a year.

$20 million a year is a lot more then he makes now I'm sure, and a lot less hassle. He would own his shows, own the relationship with the consumers and he would be able to tape his show whenever he wanted from where ever he wanted. Oh yeah, this is without advertising.

I know, you're going to tell me about huge bandwidth bills and piracy. Well, if he made his own P2P network (like the BBC is doing, or Download.com does) then he would have minimal bandwidth issues.

Also, Stern would open up to a national and global audience. Right now he doesn't get to every corner of the US, and he is only heard overseas by the tape traders on the Internet.

Additionally, I would have Howard cut a deal with Apple or Real to carry the show in their players. One of those two—or both—would bend over backwards to get the audience Stern could provide. Stern could give those plays a percentage of the take for anyone who subscribes by their services.

This is not dotcom hype, this is the state of the Internet today. What I'm describing is totally doable today. I'm not saying Stern won't loose a large percentage of his audience, he clearly will. What I'm saying is he will make the same amount of money, and over time he will gain back his audience by going into markets that have never heard him before.

Howard is a revolutionary, a modern day Lenny Bruce. However, unlike Lenny Bruce Howard lives in a time of a disintermediating technology—I wish he would leverage it.

Used BitTorrent a little bit when it first came out and was a bit underwhelmed. It didn't work, there weren't a lot of places to find files, etc.

I decided to take another look at it when a designer friend of mine was telling me that he has the latest version of every single piece of design software on his Mac compliments of bit torrent (yes, I know it's wrong… not the point I'm trying to make, the point is coming :-).

Part I: I installed bit torrent and immediately noticed an amazing new trend (prob. not new to all of you) of people posting dozens of albums in one RAR file for download. Huge file sizes in the 500 to 4,000 meg size range. The last season of seven seasons of Southpark, every Nirvanna album and here is another file with every Howard Stern radio show from March in one file.

In one click you grab one really well organized, clean and deep sets of files—scary.

Part II: A couple of month ago I got the Gateway Connected DVD player. For $195 it connects via WiFi to my desktop and I can hit the My Music or My Videos button on the remote control and pull up those directories on my hard drive (in the other room).

Part III: Today I moved into my new apartment in Santa Monica and was faced with the standard $100 month cable/dish bill and I'm thinking "dang, I only watch less then a half dozen TV shows and they are all here on bit torrent… maybe I should save the $1,200 a year and just download the shows and watch them via my Gateway Connected DVD player?"

The Point/Question: How soon before you'll be able-with one click-download every prime-time TV show or last year's top 500 CDs in one click?!

(Note: This is not a trick question, I have yet to find a file containing that much content—however, I did find a file with last weeks top 100 singles that someone put together in one nice package).

As many of us heard at SXSW.COM this week Andrew is working on pulling together RSS feeds of files with the P2P file sharing system Bit Torrent. It would be cool if someone I trusted with music advice started an RSS feed called "Song a day" that would go find me the song that the person mentioned. The person making the RSS feed would not be involved in the crime of downloading the song, just making the list. Then the people reading the Feed would be saved the step of cutting and pasting the song names, launching their P2P software, finding the files, etc.

Andrew Grumet, a freelance Web consultant, posted instructions for his demo system on his weblog. Grumet's demo consists of one small piece of software: an upgrade for the Radio RSS reader that enables it to use BitTorrent to automatically download enormous files — in the case of Grumet's demo, a set of public-domain music recordings listed on the LegalTorrents website.

Not totally unexpected, but impressive none the less, Skype has raised $18.8 million in venture capital.

According to our tech goddess (as NPR calls her) Xeni Jardin the California's Attorney General is about to run for higher office—I mean file a lawsuit against P2P networks.

Xeni gets the scoop All the President's Men style today:

However, the metadata associated with the Microsoft Word document indicates it was either drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America. According to this metadata (automatically generated by the Word application), the document's author or editor is "stevensonv." (The metadata of a document is viewable through the File menu under Properties.)

Sources tell Wired News that the draft letter's authorship is attributed to Vans Stevenson, the MPAA's senior vice president for state legislative affairs. MPAA representatives have issued similar criticisms of P2P technology in the past. Stevenson could not be reached for comment.

Skype is an amazing piece of P2P software that let's you do voice over IP (make a phone call over the Internet). They just added a feature that lets you do conference calls over the Internet. Amazing, no more paying a couple of dollars a minute for 800 number calls (at least when everyone is at their desk and tehy have a microphone and headset combo).

From the Press Release: Skype Technologies S.A., the Global P2P Telephony Company that offers consumers the ability to make free voice calls using their broadband connections, today announced the world's first peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet telephony conference calling feature, allowing up to five friends to talk with each other simultaneously, regardless of geography. Skype Beta 0.97 furthers the unique feature set that has made Skype the breakout VOIP-category product in the 6 months since its initial beta launch in August, 2003. Skype is currently offered in 15 languages and has nearly 3 million users from more than 165 countries. Skype is averaging approximately 15 new user registrations per minute.

I'm in my second panel "Next Generation File Sharing With Social Software" by Robert Kaye, MusicBrainz.

This talk has basically focused on shifting the focus of P2P networking from quantity to quality by basically adding social software (i.e. browsing) to Napster and Kazaa. This idea has been around forever, I mean Kazaa and Napster did allow you to browse people's hard drives, but the idea here would be to do something a little more like Firefly or Amazon's "People who bought this bought that" feature.

Of course, the only reason this has not happened already is the RIAA coming down hard on everyone involved. In order to make this system work the speaker said you need to cloak your private social network by having SSH and having the network be invite only.

For now if you want to do this simply go to Friendster, click on your friends lists and see who they list in their music and movie choices, or better yet just send your friends a message asking for new music choices.

Looks like Sharman is going to be allowed to take on the music biz for breaking the terms of their sofware license. That is brave.

A federal judge has ruled that the makers of the most popular file-sharing software can pursue copyright infringement claims against several movie and music companies. Sharman Networks, the company behind the Kazaa file-sharing software, filed a federal lawsuit in September accusing the entertainment companies of using unauthorized versions of its software in their efforts to snoop out users who were downloading copyright music files from others on the network.

Sharman said the companies used Kazaa Lite, an ad-less replica of its software, to get onto the network, and that they violated its own software's license agreement by sending warning messages to people on its network. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled last week that Sharman can pursue those claims. Still, Sharman may have a hard time winning its counterclaims "given how fraught with irony" they are, said Evan R. Cox, a copyright law expert in San Francisco.