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Google's trends tools give you the ability to peer inside Google's saerch logs - seeing the relative popularity of search terms such as:

• How well the PS 3 is doing versus the Wii and Xbox 360 (the PS3 is gaining on the Wii globally with the Xbox 360 drifting lower)
• Trends also cover web sites, so you can compare how Kelkoo is doing versus pricerunner and other price comparison engines

All in all a very pretty tool.  You can freely compare your traffic to your competitors'.  This service appears to be an improvement on Compare.com and Alexa.com. The ability to look at the country of origin of traffic is very interesting.

When comparing websites, the "Also visited" part of the results seems to include unlikely sites, suggesting that this section is less accurate than the traffic numbers.

Adblock Plus (Firefox only) blocks most adverts, speeding browsing, and reducing the visual clutter on many sites - banner adverts, adsense etc..  Some website owners object to its use, anticipating reduced revenues.  There doesn't appear to be much downside from the user's perspective.

If it is widely used, it may prompt a conflict between those trying to display advertising and those trying to block it.  With the default settings it doesn't manage to block ads on Google, for example.  It's another technological arms race waiting to happen, where people trying to catch our attention vie with people helping us filter what we see (email spam and comment spam).

Mike Masnick from Techdirt describes how people have been able to raise their profile by giving their content away (their music or videos), and then sell scarce goods on the back of it (their appearances or premium merchandise).

He envisages large changes in the music and video market as the content becomes more of a trailer for how much fun you can have at a live concert (for example).  Where freely released videos of gigs are the band saying "Look how much fun we had at this gig! Why not pay to come to our next one?"

Craigslist is receiving spam which can foil normal methods to prevent automated submissions (CAPTCHA and IP restrictions).

I suspect that eventually sophisticated submission software will be targetted at small sites which don't have sophisticated preventative methods, such as paler.com.  To prevent submission, new ways of restricting comments will be needed.  Users won't want to give our credit card details to all and sundry (and not everyone has credit cards).  For now, sites such as this rely on requiring users to register before posting.  During the recent software upgrade, anonymous posting was turned on accidentally - resulting in 1600 spam submissions which have now been deleted (unfortunately some real posts from non-automated anonymous posters have also have been lost ).