I’ve been keeping busy here, at the same time trying to lay off the typing. The cold weather has given me hand problems again and now I am thinking about going to see a specialist.

Here is whats new, via FT:
“Universal Music has launched the established media industry’s first legal action against rapidly growing user-generated websites by filing copyright suits against start-ups Grouper.com and Bolt.com.”
What this means: Universal is going after the smaller guys before taking on Google. YouTube is looking more and more like a huge home run for its founders. Of course, they’re payment is Google stock and I don’t know if they have any restrictions on it in terms of when they can sell.

A few days ago (I’ve lost track) Shoemoney’s blog was hacked. Some have speculated that it was a publicity stunt to get links, since the hack got him a lot of backlinks. In a way this backs up Aaron Wall’s theory that being at the top is self-reinforcing. In the search engine world, ranking for a term means other people find your site, and if they like it, they link to you. When you are in the spotlight, be it the search engines or otherwise, people suddenly get interested in really mundane stuff about you.

If you are in the domain side of things, T.R.A.F.F.I.C. is coming up October 24th-28th. All the big names will be there, here are a few: Matthew Bentley, CEO of SEdo, Monte Cahn of Moniker, Roger Collins co-founder of Afternic. Marc Ostrofsky co-founder of iREIT, Eytan Elbaz head of Google’s domain channel (you know, Adsense without the content), and of course Rick Schwartz. The list goes on. Curiously I never hear people on this side of the business talk about going to domain conferences. I will not be at this one but I’d like to make it next year. You can read more at DNJournal.