Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

Silvio Berlusconi, the somewhat shady Italian business magnate and Prime Minister, is taking on file sharing in Italy, with the Italian goverment demanding ISP’s to block The Pirate Bay.

Berlusconi doubles as the founder and majority owner of Fininvest, a media company that holds large interests in the Italian film and television industry. Obviously, Berlusconi and his managers view file sharing with a jaundiced eye, though there is no evidece to suggest a direct link between the Prime Minister and the file sharing crackdown.
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TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who hasn’t had a day off since the Carter administration, posted a what I thought was a pretty funny and chuckle-inducing post this weekend.

Apparently, Paris Hilton has been spotted cavorting around MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe. Hilton, who is 15 years DeWolfe’s junior, has been attending every one of DeWolfe’s many parties in the Hamptons on Long Island. DeWolfe is married but separated, and Hilton is supposedly dating some other guy that I’m not going to bother to figure out.
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China’s government has backtracked on an earlier pledge that journalists would have unfettered Internet access free of censorship by state authorities during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Now, that promise is gone and journalists will be prevented from accessing any information about the occupation of Tibet, Taiwan independence, the Tiananmen Square protests, and other sources of information deemed subversive by Chinese leadership.

China is not doing itself any favors with their explanations for the blockage: initially, a government spokesman blamed the problems on site hosts. Now, they are acknowledging the problem has nothing to do with hosting or technical issues.
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Robert Scoble went on a rant today about the sorry state of Tech blogging. He covered a wide variety of issues, including the influence of PR firms, the lack of fact checking that goes on in a rush to be first, and the inordinate interest in business (the Yahoo deal’s constant place on TechMeme being one of his pet peeves).
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TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is the top tech blogger out there for a reason: he writes some pretty original and provocative material. Undoubtedly, when you’re at the top of the heap, more people are likely to let you in on what is brewing. Today is no different, and in my fruitless search for something interesting to write about, nothing seems quite as fascinating as Arrington’s paean to pill-popping.

According to Arrington, the new pill of choice for Silicon Valley startup execs is called Provigil, or Modafinil by its generic title. While Arrington claims the Cephalon-produced drug is used to treat narcolepsy, the description of its uses on the drug’s website appears a lot more open-ended than simply narcolepsy: it recommended for “excessive sleepiness (ES) due to one of the following diagnosed sleep disorders: obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), shift work sleep disorder (SWSD), or narcolepsy.”
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