There's an old business saying: If you want to make money in a gold rush, don't prospect, sell shovels. This is the same sort of idea that happened with Twitter and URL shorteners.

URL shortening services are the shovels of the Twitter gold rush, except nobody's making any money selling them.

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Microsoft's sale of Razorfish, which for only two years served as its creative advertising division, to French ad giant Publicis Groupe is not so much the indication of a new trend, but of an old trend that is being suspended for now, perhaps for some very old-fashioned reasons.

In the present-day Internet business model, the principal generator of revenue is advertising. Unless a Web site or publisher is in the music delivery business, or happens to be one of the world's few paid search providers, there's few other alternatives for a steady source of income. But as with nearly all media these days, publishers are contending with whether they actually need to invest in the creative side of the process -- why not let someone else create the content, or better yet, let's see if someone will volunteer to do it for free.

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Toshiba this morning announced that it has applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), the body in charge of standardizing and evangelizing the high definition disc format, and that it intends to launch Blu-ray notebooks and standalone players this year.

"In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA," read the company's statement this morning.

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In a set of comprehensive Windows Web browser performance tests conducted by Betanews on August 7 -- our first test of browsers running on the final Windows 7 RTM Build 7600 distributed by Microsoft yesterday -- the five major families of browsers tended to run 13% faster on Windows XP Service Pack 3 than on Windows 7, and 29% faster than on Windows Vista Service Pack 2.

That reflects a decline in the speed gap between XP and Win7 of about 1%, from tests conducted comparing XP-based browsers to those running on Windows 7 Release Candidate Build 7100. Some browsers are faster in Windows 7 RTM, although Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2 ran just a tick slower.

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Which Microsoft Office version is most popular at US retail stores -- brick and mortar or online? Office Home and Student 2007, which inherited the position from XP and 2003 versions of Office Student and Teacher. Home and Student accounts for "85 percent of Office sales, either Mac or PC," said Stephen Baker, NPD's vice president of industry analysis.

I asked Baker for the percentage because it's that time of year when students are preparing to go back to school and Microsoft and retailers practically give away Office Home and Student. Last week, I spotted the software, which normally sells for $149.95, at Microsoft Store for $99.99. That's a good deal, right? Wrong. This week, I saw the software at my local Costco selling for $81.99, after mail-in rebate. That's an even better deal, right? Wrong. Amazon sells the software for $79.99, no rebate.

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The U.S.' second most popular retailer, Target announced that it will be ending its 8-year relationship with Amazon.com and launching its own new platform for Target.com, which does not rely on Amazon's services.

Steve Eastman, president of Target.com said, "The strength of Amazon's technology and fulfillment services has been a contributing factor in Target.com's success. However, to deliver a customized multi-channel experience for Target's guests, we believe it is in Target's best interest going forward to assume full control over the design and management of Target's e-commerce technology platform, fulfillment and guest services operations."

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Earlier this summer, Digg's Chief Revenue and Strategy officer Mike Maser announced the beta of Digg Ads, a novel advertising platform where readers rate ads and determine how much the advertisers has to pay. For example, an ad which has lots of Diggs will cost an advertiser much less than if an add is buried. Ads can be buried so much that they are priced out of the system.

This week, the site has begun the rollout of an early beta version of Digg Ads. For a select group of users, paid entries will begin to appear on the site. The only difference between these advertisements and traditional Digg entries is that the advertisements are marked as "sponsored", similar to sponsored results on search sites.

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In June, cable operator Comcast and media company Time Warner announced that they would begin working on the new distribution model known as "TV Everywhere," a Web-based streaming service akin to Hulu that would give Comcast subscribers on-demand access to cable content at a premium. Ideally, the service will help cable companies make more money off of streaming content than syndication sites currently do.

Now, satellite television network DirecTV has reportedly entered into discussions with Comcast and Time Warner about joining TV Everywhere.

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It takes a lot to get Apple to make a statement to the public, but the ongoing controversy related to the company's App Store review policy has come to such an agitated peak that Apple has repeatedly been forced to explain itself.

Yesterday, Senior Vice President Phil Schiller had to make a stand against allegations of downright censorship by the blogosphere.

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Since at least 1999, the lucrative Web URL Office.com has been registered to someone other than Microsoft, the company most closely associated with that term with regards to software. Most recently, Office.com wasn't owned by any cybersquatter, but by ContactOffice Group -- a very legitimate Belgian company which used the URL to establish a virtual e-mail client accessible through desktop and mobile Web browsers.

Late last June, Office.com's clients received e-mails from ContactOffice notifying them that their accounts will be moved to the contactoffice.com domain at the end of July. There's only one really good reason why a company would move from a ubiquitous trademark to an arguably more obscure one; and today, the logic behind that reason was confirmed by the Internet's string of WHOIS databases: Microsoft is now the official owner of the Office.com domain.

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Is Microsoft asking too much of consumers and small businesses planning to upgrade existing Windows XP or Vista PCs to Windows 7? That's the question I asked several analysts after reviewing a chart Microsoft provided to veteran technology reviewer Walt Mossberg.

Out of 66 upgrade scenarios, only 14 allow for "in-place" upgrades. The majority of scenarios require "custom install," which means either installing Windows 7 to a new directory or onto a clean hard drive. While data can be backed up and recovered, applications would need to be reinstalled.

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Though the news actually leaked out a bit early in the "AppPack" at the end of July, Geodelic's location-based Android app called Sherpa was officially launched yesterday for all Android users.

Sherpa combines "Web 2.0"-style profiling with location-based and contextual data to suggest nearby attractions, restaurants and retailers. Using a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), Sherpa automatically learns a user's favorite locations and lifestyle behavior.  If a user eats out more than shops, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. Sherpa will also only give suggestions that are pertinent to the time of day, so if you run a search at 2:00 am looking for government offices, you're not likely get anything without searching specifically.

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The current three-year working arrangement between the US Dept. of Commerce and the institution that maintains the Internet's top-level domain structure, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), expires at the end of this September. With the Internet being perceived as more of an international platform than an American one, support is growing among overseas legislators including the European Commission for the US Government to let lapse the term of its oversight role, and let ICANN be answerable to an international agency.

In very clear, and perhaps not-so-diplomatically phrased, statement last June, new ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom voiced his support for such a move. Although ICANN's partnerships with the DoC and private firm VeriSign were instrumental in moving past square one on a project to sign and secure the Internet's root zone addresses, Beckstrom said such partnerships could continue anyway if ICANN were answerable to an oversight board made up of its multitude of international stakeholders.

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Microsoft has a problem on its hands. Or more precisely one problem with three seemingly contradictory components:

Windows XP is too good for its own good. It needs to die for the company's sake. It won't die because nothing else -- not even Windows 7 -- currently approaches it.

We're closing in on eight years since XP first hit the market and began the long process of making us finally forget we ever used Windows 95, 98, and Windows Me. By anyone's standards, it's been one of Microsoft's most visibly successful products. It still runs on some 60% of all PCs years after it was supposed to have been retired as a front-line offering. It's sold around 800 million copies since its initial release. And if piracy is the sincerest form of flattery, hundreds of millions more illegal copies are in use across the globe. In an age where icons are in desperately short supply, this is as iconic a product as it gets.

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Right on schedule Thursday morning, what can probably be described as the "latest final edition" of Build 7600 of Windows 7 was made available to subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet services for developers and admins. This will enable them to begin the process of finalizing upgrades to applications and to the systems using them, prior to the general availability date for the operating system, which remains set for October 22.

Absent from this morning's distribution, though not surprisingly, was any hint of "Windows 7 E," the browserless build of the OS that had been slated for distribution exclusively in Europe in the event that the European Commission had not reached a decision on the company's browser selection proposal. Last month, Microsoft presented a formal proposal to the EC that modeled a Web-based selection system for installing default browsers, one which presented Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera alongside Internet Explorer 8, in a menu that all European Windows users would see -- not just those with Windows 7.

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