Top Items:

Hungry Media Companies Find a Meager Menu of Web Sites to Buy — Media companies are still hungry. Is there much left for them to consume that they'll find satisfying? — NBC Universal's $600 million acquisition of iVillage, an early Internet company catering to women …

MySpace Messenger on the Way — The cool kids are all talking about the impending release of MySpace Messenger (screenshots below). The story appeared on Digg yesterday, and the commenters are impatiently trying to make it to work. No official launch has been mentioned yet. — So is this a good idea?
RELATED ITEMS:

MySpace Messenger Coming — Update: So this has been something which has been whispered for a while, but Pete Cashmore has discovered actual screen shots of MySpace Messenger. Even though the screen shots have been around for a while (as pointed out by eagle eyed readers) …
Discussion:
The Kelsey Group Blog

Behold the power of botnets — (Adam Piggott of Proactive Services originally found this mess, contacted Suzi Turner at SpywareWarrior who got him in touch with one of our spyware researchers, Adam Thomas.) — Discussions about botnets in the security community are quite active these days.
Discussion:
Spyware Confidential

AOL's Blog King — After selling his Weblog network for millions, Jason Calacanis speaks up for rebel journalism. — March 20, 2006 issue - Last October, the question of whether blogging could be a business was pretty much decided when AOL paid a reported $25 million for Weblogs, Inc. …

Alive and Well in Silicon Alley — THEY arrived in crisp button-downs and pleated Dockers, 150 or so, nearly all men in their 20's and 30's, few of whom would probably object to being called a nerd. — The event, the New York Tech Meetup — part technology conference …

The business lessons of World of Warcraft — AUSTIN, Texas—"World of Warcraft" is a game. There's no doubt about it. More than 6 million people around the world have signed up to go questing, kill beasts, search out loot, and have fun with friends and strangers alike.
Discussion:
Joi Ito's Web

Playing with Wordpress.com New Sidebar Widgets … Hideously named "WordPress Widgets" is the method of accessorizing your Wordpress.com sidebar on WordPress Themes which permit such interaction. Through the use of Javascripts and Ajax, you can simply click and move boxes representing content elements within your Theme's sidebar.

Feature: Blogging Down the House — The games writer for Salon and the embedded journalist in Second Life rallies Kotaku readers in a war to save games from their worse enemy—the gaming press. This is an expanded version of a talk delivered March 11 at South by Southwest's ScreenBurn Fest in Austin, Texas.

Mental Typewriter and Game Controller Becomes a Reality — 'Mental typewriter' controlled by thought alone — A computer controlled by the power of thought alone has been demonstrated at CEBIT in Germany. As we have speculated here, rapid advances in cybernetics are now ocurring …
Discussion:
Kotaku

Chinese Bank's Server Used in Phishing Attacks on US Banks — A web server belonging to a state-operated Chinese bank is hosting phishing sites targeting U.S. banks and financial institutions. Phishing e-mails sent on Saturday (March 11) targeting customers of Chase Bank and eBay were directed …

The shift to Social Computing — There's been a lot of interest recently in the social aspects of Web 2.0 experiences because of their tendency to alter the communities that use them. As part of tracking this, I wrote recently about McKinsey and Co.'s discussion of coming Interaction Age …

Dead Trees, still expensive — The big news of the day is that Knight Ridder Company is being sold for $4.5 billion to the McClatchy Company. — KRC, not to be confused a spurious take on ultrafine KFC, has about 32 dailies in 29 markets, with a daily circulation of 3.3 million.

GOOGLE IS SELLING BOOKS — Back in the day (OK, 18 months ago), Google was quite coy about whether or not it was going to get into the business of marketplace transactions. Since Video and Base came out, however, it's clear the company is looking to move in on eBay and Amazon, and now the company is in the bookselling business.