From the BBC: Six of the UK's biggest net providers have agreed a plan with the music industry to tackle piracy online. The deal, negotiated by the government, will see hundreds of thousands of letters sent to net users suspected of illegally sharing music. But the music industry wants people's internet cut off if they ignore repeated warnings, something the web firms say they are not prepared to d...

Early last year we did a major piece of work on the economcs of online advertising, and found that - lo and behold - there is not enough advertsing overall (never mind the 6% or so that is online) to support a freeconomic "Web 2.0" business world. The total global Adspend is about $0.5 trillion, of which about 6% - c $30bn - is online today. Given that the overall ICT marketplace is c $3 trillion,...

I'll be on the Service Infrastructure panel (thats about the unsexy stuff wot makes the whole 2.0 thang run) at the Wealth of Networks Conference tomorrow. This session covers: Some technology trends are clear - such as multicore processors, disk sizes and network bandwidths. Others, like the evolution of the Web and Semantic Web, less so - largely because these technologies are evolving within the...

Yesterday we disagreed with the Patent Blog re its view that the changes in the US patent system was unfair to entrepreneurs - this is typical of the sort of thing possible in the US previously (from TechCrunch UK) Last week TechCrunch reported that Channel Intelligence (CI), a company based in Florida, had filed a lawsuit for patent infringement in the US against a long list of startups which - ge...

Yet again the rumours fly that Google will acquire Digg, this time for c $200m. Many are reporting this today, but I have the same question as Venturebeat - why bother? If Yahoo and AOL can build their own news aggregator properties, why can't Google refine its own Google News site — where Digg may or may not be integrated with — or start its own Digg clone rather than buy Digg in the first pla...