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?

If you want to know where degree zero of the Web 2.0 world is - it is Gnomedex 2005 and you have just missed it.  The blogosphere is going crazy with speculation and comment, driven largely by Microsoft's announced plans to deeply integrate RSS technology into Longhorn. Exciting news, certainly. But also, a bit like getting a smile from a crocodile.

If you think TiVo has got the network advertisers running scared, imagine a world in which not only advertising but the configuration of your product itself becomes a matter of choice for consumers. The genius of the Firefox browser is not just that it is wickedly fast, but that it also allows third party developers to extend its functionality. As you can imagine, when the world’s ubergeeks contemplate hotting up their browsers, ad skipping and site modification are at the top of their list. But this is not just a web fringe phenomenon. With global Firefox adoption rates now gaining momentum, publishers will soon have to accept that it will be readers and not editors who will decide not only what they look at, but also in what form and at what cost. 

If you want to amuse yourself for a few hours and gamble with a few hundred million, chew on this one for a while. Do movies make better video games than video games make movies? It is easy to find examples that prove either case, and some that prove both – an awful movie that makes an awful lot of money. The big news this week is Microsoft touting Halo as the next big thing. So does the Bill and Balmer show now have eyes for prime time? 

The rumour mill has it that Google is about to enter the fray with a classified listings product. The listings model, as popularised by Craigslist has been a persistent thorn in the side of both newspaper groups and eBay, which has of late been aggressively acquiring stakes in free classified players.