Tim Conneally

Web analytics company comScore this week released its top fifty US Web properties list for May 2008 based upon its Media Metrix service, and Google's leading the pack by a nose.

In April, comScore reported a surge in Google queries, taking it up a whole 1.8% from March, when all other search engines dropped. Strictly as a Web property, however, Yahoo is usually comScore's favorite. It enjoyed several months on the top of the hot properties list, only now to be taken down a notch by Google.

Sprint Nextel announced that its vie for an extension to the mandatory relinquishment of portions of the 800 MHz spectrum was a success. The FCC has now moved the deadline to July 1, 2009.

On Tuesday of last week, Sprint Nextel filed for more time with the FCC to move some of its services out of their current frequency range and into an area less likely to cause interference with the public safety agencies in the spectral vicinity. The relocation is part of a project designed to improve the quality and reliability of emergency and public safety communications in the 800 MHz band.

France's Cultural Minister Christine Albanel introduced a bill to discourage the consumption of pirated media, under the threat of revoking the perpetrator's Internet access. Yesterday, that bill was approved by the Council of Ministers.

In addition to establishing the creation of a new state agency to be called HADOPI (High Authority for Copyright Protection and Dissemination of Works on the Internet), the "key measure" of Albanel's project is the three-strikes policy (or riposte graduée, lit. "gradual response") it will impose upon illegal downloaders.

During a Webcast to employees yesterday, Hewlett-Packard's print division chief Vyomesh Joshi announced that the division will soon undergo restructuring to consolidate five business units into three.

The parts of the company which will will feel these "disruptive" changes, according to spokespeople, will include the LaserJet and Commercial Printer units, and the inkjet (DeskJet) and consumer supplies units, which will become two new units of the company.

Late Tuesday, Sprint Nextel filed for an extension in its relinquishment of portions of the 800 MHz spectrum which will be used for public safety purposes.

The FCC's original plan for rebranding the 800 MHz spectrum dates back to 2004, when the Commission initiated practices to "remedy the interference problem" in this band occurring between Cellular architecture systems and "high-site non-cellular systems" used by public safety agencies (19 F.C.C.R. 14,969, 14,972).

Celebrating the release of British alt-pop group Coldplay's new album "Viva la Vida: or Death and All his Friends," Amazon has taken the opportunity to offer customers the band's entire back catalog for $1.99 per album.

Even though Apple's iTunes has been running "exclusively on iTunes" commercials for Coldplay's newest album since May, "Viva.." is Amazon's top-selling album today. The retailer is now offering the album DRM-free for one dollar cheaper than iTunes.

Since early morning yesterday, Google's App Engine Web application hosting service has been forced into a limp, yielding persistent errors for users attempting to access their applications.

In the App Engine Forum at 6:35 pm PT yesterday, a team member posted a brief explanation of why users were having difficulty: "This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we're currently working on a fix. Going forward, we're also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won't affect the stability of the system as a whole."

2008 has begun to look a lot like 2006 for Sony BMG in Europe. Publishing association Impala asked courts to overturn the EC's merger approval a second time, and joint venture partner Bertelsmann AG again expressed its desire to back away.

Independent music industry representative Impala has built a platform of opposition to major label mergers, and in its "mission statement" makes this assertion: "Independent music companies are often micro companies and SME's [small and medium enterprises], they're are at a disadvantage with regard to the majors; they do not have access to the same developed communication networks, financing, means to run marketing campaigns, the distribution networks. Some acquisitions and mergers squeeze SMEs out of the market, leading to a lack of diversity for consumers. "

Today was originally scheduled to be the date that both NVidia and ATI launched their next-generation graphics products, but NVidia had the only one that made it out the door in time.

NVidia's GeForce GTX 200 GPU series (comprised of the 260 and 280 units) has now been made available. The 280 is equipped with 240 cores, and offers 1 GB of frame buffer memory, while the 260 has 192 processors and 896 MB of memory. They cost $649 and $399 respectively through such sites as Amazon, Newegg, TigerDirect, MWave, MCIX, and ZipZoomfly.

Sporting a design and feature list not unlike Nokia's N95 and N96, Sony Ericsson's C905 Cybershot blows Nokia's devices away in one area: picture resolution.

Sony Ericsson officially announced today its Cybershot C905 handset which had been shown through "leaks" last week. Offering support for GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900 UMTS/HSDPA 2100, Sony Ericsson has announced that the C905 will be made available in select markets as early as the fourth quarter of this year.

The AP's disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the alternative it's now offering to being served with takedown notices involves paying an up-front sum for excerpting online articles -- as few as five words.

A meeting between the Associated Press' Vice President for Strategic Planning Jim Kennedy and Robert Cox, who heads the Media Bloggers Association, is now planned for Thursday of this week. The subject at hand is the AP's attempt to find a new way of sharing AP content, which now involves a fee per excerpt based on its word length.

Washington DC-based software company Mesa Dynamics has launched Amnesty Hypercube in beta, an application designed to create an iTunes-like market around Web services and widgets.

Bearing more than a passing resemblance to iTunes, Amnesty Hypercube allows users to assemble a "playlist" of Web-based widgets and allows them to be opened from the desktop, embedded in the dashboard with the traditional widgets, or placed in social networking sites.

Last week's well-publicized Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices from the Associated Press to social news site The Drudge Retort caused an uproar. Now the AP is calling its own actions "heavy handed."

Associated Press licensee The New York Times reported that Jim Kennedy, Vice President and strategy director of the AP, emerged from a Saturday meeting of its executives with a decidedly more placatory tone.

Though not yet officially announced, reports have surfaced that FCC Chairman Martin supports the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio companies, and will recommend that the Commission vote to push the transaction through.

The willingness of XM and Sirius to comply with demands set forth for their merger appears to be working. FCC Chairman Kevin J. Martin said on Sunday that he will support the combination of the two satellite radio providers given their adherence to certain stipulations.

Yesterday, competing services Flixwagon and Qik both announced that they will be offering their live streaming phone-cam services for Apple's iPhone.

While neither is ready to open their developments to the public at present, both companies expect alpha versions to be released before the end of July.