Happy New Year everyone. I hope you had a good break over the holidays. My wife is Japanese and we live in Japan at the moment, so as is traditional we went back to her hometown over New Year and stayed with her family. On the first day that all the family came back, for after-dinner entertainment we spent the time watching funny video clips on YouTube. The TV sat dark and forlornly in the corner, like a relic from the past …

As you can see if you’re not reading this in an RSS reader, I’ve redesigned my site. I did it myself from scratch, as a learning exercise. So some things might be a bit askew until I get everything in working order again. Please let me know if you notice anything strange, especially if you’re using a weird browser like Internet Explorer.

Here’s a few things that caught my eye over the holidays:

The end of the music industry in 2008.

Deconstructing Google: After the breakup (potential future antitrust woes for Google?).

XBRL looks like it’s going to be a pretty cool tool for research.

Limewire is now found on more than one third of PCs.

The RIAA’s scare tactics don’t seem to be working: The number of torrents and peers on The Pirate Bay doubled in 2007.

Facebook is beta-testing a payments platform.