Naomi Klein notwithstanding, Brands are back on the agenda. Once you abandon the mid twentieth century view of brands as just a cynical megamix of product benefits, you are open to musing about a more interesting question. What are people actually buying when they knowingly pay a premium for a brand name?

What makes a good market? Plenty of buyers and sellers certainly. But with competition in the web classifieds space pushing the value of all listings to zero, capturing critical mass through disruptive pricing tactics will no longer work. Market leadership now depends on moving past the ‘newspaper ads on the web’ model to creating true value exchanges.

Blogs are the new black. Whether you are a Fortune 500 CEO, an ambitious engineer working the late shift or a promiscuous Singaporean teen – you’ve got to have one. For the uninitiated, the prospect of adding yet more words to the ocean of information on the web may seem futile. But fame and power await those who manage to break out of the mass of hyperlinked opinion.
No wonder that media companies are also starting to get religion. Readers secretly want to be moguls too.

Robert Cringely had some interesting things to say today about the Supreme Court's ruling on P2P filetrading networks Grokster and Streamcast, and its implications on the emerging Web 2.0 meme.

As they say – no new tunes in the key of C. But in an age of Tarantino,hip hop sampling and Google API mashups – the remix is generally better than the real thing. What should be a headache for intellectual property lawyers, is becoming fertile ground for legal innovation with
the rise of the creative commons licensing regime. But does copyright altruism really add up to new economy affluence?