Just when you thought it was safe to watch Letterman again, those Top n lists keep coming around. Today we have PC World's Top 100 Products of 2005, which picks Firefox as #1, Gmail as #2, Tiger as #3. Sounds a lot like the software lineup on my system ...

And here's another Top list, the Online Publisher Association's top 12 traffic drivers: #1 is "entertains, absorbs me" but #9 is "turned on by ads," ahead of "ease of use" (sorry Jakob ... oops, that's a hidden link) and "helps and improves me." FWIW. ...

Newsweek has a piece on video search engines, especially Blinkx. Basically, the networks are willing to play ball with for-free services that can make their products legitimately available online. The lesson from the music industry: When consumers are creating a new sales medium, maybe you should meet them with a storefront instead of a subpoena.

The strategy of the TV industry is not to fight the pirates so much as beat them at their own game—by making their television programming available, for a fee, on legitimate Internet-based video libraries. The key is to offer a service that's so much better than the rogue peer-to-peer networks that customers don't mind paying. "There's this general assumption that people will always steal content if they can, but I don't think that's true," says Chandratillake. "The success of the new Napster and iTunes demonstrates that people are very interested in downloading broadband content online and paying for it, if it's priced right and available easily."

(More later ...)