Much more on this later -- I'm putting together items for tonight's newscast on this -- but the Canadian Recording Industry Association's attempt to force ISPs to turn over customer information that would help CRIA sue what it alleges are illegal music downloaders has failed. A Federal Court of Canada ...   more »

A very nice piece by CNET's David Becker on the relationship between Apple Computer and Adobe Systems Inc.. Both companies are richer because of each other's existence. Adobe committed early to the Macintosh platform and always made sure that updates of applications like Photoshop were out on the Mac ...   more »

Clay Shirky describes a new term -- situated software-- in his latest essay, released to the Net this evening.
Shirky says "situated software" is "designed in and for a particular social situation or context. This way of making software is in contrast with what I'll call the Web ...   more »

Two b-school professors conclude in a new study released today that music downloads do not seem to have any impact on music industry sales. Their study, concludes "downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates, moreover, these ...   more »

The latest NADBANK survey is out. Most papers, it seems, are losing readers, particularly readers who are 18-34. Free subway paper in Toronto, though, doing very well with a big jump in readership. In Vancouver, Province and Sun switch places as the most-read paper in that city. Some reports: The ...   more »

OK, now this whole blog thing is really going mainstream. Noam Chomsky has a blog: "This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet sustainer forum system where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes ...   more »

I work at some big-time, big-city capital-m Media outlets but I started out at the twice-a-week Orangeville Banner and worked my way from there to one small daily to another. When I was at the Banner, I'd have given my eye teeth to be on staff at the Globe ...   more »

I asked gas station owners, petroleum industry associations, economists, analysts, and as many consumers as I could find but no one could provide with a satisfactory answer about why gas prices in my market --- the Toronto area -- or in Montreal, Halifax, Winnipeg, and other major Canadian cities are ...   more »

Here, in all its glory, is a good example of the dopey pitches reporters too often get. (Thank goodness they come now by e-mail and not by telephone!) The pitcher here is a fellow named Jamie Adams. I've never heard of him before and it seems obvious he's never ...   more »

Intel Corp. will begin doing what its competitor Advanced Micro Devices Inc. did more than two years ago and stop referring to its chips by the clock speed of that chip. Instead, Intel will name its chip kind of like car makers like Mercedes-Benz or BMW. Just as Mercedes has ...   more »