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when will Microsoft release a free, ad-supported online version of their office-suite? will it be called Office Live? and will it happen before Google’s lightweight office-apps finally include a featureset that will be a sufficient replacement for mainstream-users? a - though quickly altered - blog-post from within Microsoft leads to new speculation at TechCrunch.

Freebase - currently in private beta - is generating some buzz (Tim O’Reilly, John Markoff, N. Carr - who describes Freebase as the first major Web 3.0 app). Freebase is a massively distributed, collaboratively-edited, freely structured database - or, as O’Reilly puts it - a folksonomy-based approach on weaving the Semantic Web:

“But hopefully, this narrative will give you a sense of what Metaweb [the company that created Freebase] is reaching for: a wikipedia like system for building the semantic web. But unlike the W3C approach to the semantic web, which starts with controlled ontologies, Metaweb adopts a folksonomy approach, in which people can add new categories (much like tags), in a messy sprawl of potentially overlapping assertions.”

now here’s a cool iTunes-plugin: iConcertCal automatically retrieves upcoming events matching your music library and displays them within iTunes. current sources seem to be a bit US-centric, but that could be fixed by mashing with upcoming.org.

going to be released on monday, RatePoint will be adding avatar-rating and social networking features to SecondLife. quite amazing, considering it’s based solely on SL’s scripting language.

37 Signals is joining the growing number of wellknown sites supporting OpenID with their upcoming CRM-tool Highrise.

here’s one for the weekend: another Google-song

though Pandora and Last.fm have been dominating the market of web-based music recommendation- & streaming-services during the past two years, we’ve seen some interesting new products emerging these days. while recently reviewed SpotDJ enters new ground, turning listeners into content-producers by recording their comments on tracks, iLike is unique in terms of the particular music its based on. produced by the makers of indy-music site Garageband.com, iLike is a nicely integrated iTunes plugin-recommending independent, free music from Garageband, based on a users library and the communities listening-habits.

I strongly disagree with Marshall Kirkpatrick from TechCrunch, who’s basically claiming that most indie-music is not able to deliver quality - there’s quite a few good tracks to be discovered. considering the slick user-interface and presuming that the service is aimed at the hardcore music-lover, willing to spend a good amount of time to discover fresh stuff offside mainstream, I really think iLike is worth a try. a future version of the plugin could integrate even more features from the website, like f.e. direct feedback on the quality of recommendations.

similar services include MyStrands and Qloud, which I haven’t had a chance to try out yet. if you want to share your experiences with these products, feel free to post a comment!

SpotDJ is an innovative service aimed at people who are feeling bored by listening to a monotonous stream of playlisted audio-tracks and instead wish to get background-infos on currently played artist & track or just some moody rant - like radio-DJs did back in the day

using the locally installed SpotDJ application, listeners become radio-DJs by easily recording audio-comments on tracks they like. when listening to music, SpotDJ automatically searches for matching audio-commentary from other users, which are than injected into the playlist right after the song. since the service only switched to public beta two days ago, it’s no big surprise that comments appear to bit quite scarce. however, I was able to receive quite good comments on popular artists like Gorillaz, Massive Attack or Jamiroquai - the short clips feature users with an attitude celebrating their idols or recommending similar artists.

currently, SpotDJ works with iTunes (both Mac and Windows) only. according to this TechCrunch-article, SpotDJ plans to extend their service to the iPod as soon as possible.

as anticipated by many customers, Apple quickly released a follow-up to the bemoaned 7.0 release of iTunes. iTunes 7.0.1 (both windows and mac osx) “addresses stability and performance issues with Cover Flow, CD importing, iPod syncing, and more”. however, feedback on the update indicates that some problems still persist, so I was glad to find this download-link to iTunes 6.0.5 on Apple’s support forums.

iTunes 7 received loads of bad press immediately after last weeks release. especially Windows-users complain about heavily increased CPU- and memory-load, disfunctional download of cover-artwork, problems with certain iPod-models and destroyed installations. this reminds a lot of itTunes 6, which was quite buggy in its inital release as well (lets remember this when iTunes 8 arrives! ;)). while we wait for salvation in the form of a - hopefully not too distant - upgrade, this MacWorld UK-article lists Apple’s official support-documents addressing the issues.

Apple’s ‘Showtime’-event focussed on digital media just ended 2 hours ago, and like with augusts WWDC keynote, I’m not too impressed with the outcome. check TechCrunch for a brief summary or Engadget for an extremley detailed live-blog + hands-on reports with all products.

as expected, iTMS now sells feature-movie downloads for as low as $13 (pre-orders and first-week buyers) and $15 (regular price) - that’s right in the middle of Amazon’s Unbox rates ($8-20). movies are encoded in 640×480 H.264 (nearly DVD-quality), include Dolby Surround, and can of course be put on any video-enabled iPod under the same DRM-restrictions as iTMS tv-shows. while this sounds fine, the downside is that - as of today - the iTMS is starting with a mere 75 movie-titles from several Disney-studios.

Apple supplements the iTMS with iTunes 7 (cosmetic changes on the user-interface, album-artwork and gapless playback - a feature I ranted about some time ago) and several new iPod-models. there’s a new aluminium Nano in four selected colours (remember the mini-days) a tiny, square successor to the Shuffle (very cool) and an upgraded 5.5G iPod (better battery life, lower price, more storage - yawn). still missing: the touchscreen-video-iPod which is rumoured about since…well, anyway.

one more thing - iTV (codename!), a streaming-client connecting to any TV-set is announced for early 2007. through a Frontrow-like interface, iTV will bring your existing iTunes-library to your living-room. iTV won’t include any storage itself, and it’s unclear if it will be able to access media-files on a non-iTunes-fileshare or NAS-device (probably not, and even if, there won’t be any support for your pirated backup-divx ).