By turning every Yahoo search box into a Bing box, Microsoft may have bought itself the exposure it needs to be the next Google.

As a professional journalist who nonetheless champions a 'people's' Internet, I am happy to compete against the thousands of amateur bloggers out there reporting and commenting on the same stories I do.

Marketers spend millions developing strategies to identify children's predilections and then capitalize on their vulnerabilities. Young people are fooled for a while, but then develop defense mechanisms, such as media-savvy attitudes or ironic dispositions. Then marketers research these defenses, develop new countermeasures, and on it goes.

Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme.

Everything we do in the digital realm - from surfing the Web to sending an e-mail to conducting a credit card transaction to, yes, making a phone call - creates a data trail. And if that trail exists, chances are someone is using it - or will be soon enough.

I feel like Hollywood would rather end the emerging, bottom-up creative culture than let it happen.