Amazon is now offering to read some of your paper books online as well (for an additional "Upgrade price").

Game playing by email.

Play Quoridor over email!

An online boaters course that meets the requirement of WA boater education. $15 charge to get your completion certificate.

This study predicts that online display advertising will DECREASE to 50% current levels in 4 years. Also predicting a decline is paid search advertising. Why would THAT be?

At the same time, they are predicting that online promotions (sweepstakes, contests, coupons, instant-win games) will triple from $8B to $23B in 5 years.

Do you believe it?

Notice the complex cross-division responsibilities behind even the new MS online organizational structure. The only one that looks "clean" from this description is aQuantive. It look like they are letting Brian McAndrews continue to run a silo-ed business (which means the team will probably remain happy and productive).

I don't envy the Search, MSN Portal, and Live teams.

Quoted: Bits is a blog about technology, innovation and society from The New York Times.

CMU's answer to MIT's open courseware? It looks like they are more focused on actually providing complete online course - and not just in placing the course materials online.

Free Trial of Adobe Connect for 15 days - I'll try this out and compare with our webex experience.

Quoted: Adobe Acrobat Connect - communicate and collaborate instantly through interactive online personal meetings.

Adobe Connect is $39.95 for single user (the "Professional" version in $375/mo for 5 users).

WebEx works well for Windows clients - but does not support Linux - and I've heard problems from Mac users. WebEx is about $50/month for a single user.