Top Stories

Christmas carols aren't the only music in the air this week. MTV and Microsoft teamed up to announce Urge, an online music service to rival Apple’s iTunes. It's about time, says CNET News.com—they've only been talking about this since 2003. Look for this battle to get messy: Urge will work with Windows Media Player but not on iPods. 

Still, the MTV-Microsoft deal may take a back seat to TagWorld, a startup targeting the MySpace crowd with Ajax tools, a gig of music storage, top bands on board, and digital rights options for controlling distribution. TechCrunch thinks TagWorld could take MySpace down but check out this Businessweek story on the MySpace Generation before you bite. If MySpace really has 10% of all inventory on the Web, Rupert Murdoch got a deal when he bought the company for $600 million says John Batelle’s Searchblog.

In Web 2.0 news, Google Blog takes the wraps off tools for creating custom Google widgets. TechCrunch got the lowdown on who’s using Meebo (250,000 logins per day!) and how, while Ajaxian wonders is instant messaging in a browser really useful? Scobleizer says check out the desktop widgets on Goowy. And 37 Signals has a list of the Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 on Signal vs. Noise.

The Wikipedia saga continues. business2blog interviews Jimmy Wales about fakester Brian Chase, the facts, and the New Pages Patrol. Will there be a class-action lawsuit against Wikipedia? O'Reilly Radar says it could be a hoax. The open source encyclopedia is getting some things right: a study found its science entries as accurate as those in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

It was a sober week for political bloggers. Just before convicted murderer Stanley Tookie Williams was executed at San Quentin, Doc Searls weighed in, saying Williams was about to die because of a bad book review from Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Michelle Malkin is sick of the left-wing circus and planned "statesman's funeral" for the Crips founder while Huffington Post challenges death penalty naysayers not to be racist and get behind the next guy scheduled to die, a 76-year-old white man.

And on the eve of elections in Iraq, President Bush accepted responsibility for taking the U.S. to war on faulty intelligence, but defended the decision saying it had produced "a watershed moment in the story of freedom." Bloggers also rallied to provide round-the-clock coverage of the Iraqi elections while the London Independent has stats on 1,000 days of war via Daily Kos.