and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Short online music industry update. Rumours abound that Google may be getting ready to release it's own iTunes Killer but personally I'm skeptical. For one, Google may own the online services bidness right now but they have done a relatively poor job of giving us good software. The only decent offerings they have were bought and acquired from others (e.g. Picasa). Secondly, Google isn't in the software bidness. They may think they are or they may want to be (see the questionably odd Google Pack offering - what the fah?) but they certainly aren't up to snuff on that front.

Side Note: Microsoft to build the next iPod Killer - next? Which one was the first? We've seen a slew of great music players with more features than the iPod and I don't think they've failed because they aren't designed as well, Apple just be the big man on the block these days. Branding, yo, branding.

Finally, Google may be brave enough to stand up to the U.S. gov'ment

Google has refused to comply with a Department of Justice subpoena requesting "a 'random sampling' of 1 million Internet addresses accessible through Google's popular search engine, and a random sampling of 1 million search queries submitted to Google over a one-week period"

but the fury of Red China still makes them quake in their boots (or, alternately, the potential market lose of China.. whatever):

Web search leader Google Inc. said on Tuesday it was introducing a new service for China that seeks to avoid a confrontation with the government by restricting access to services to which users contribute such as e-mail, chat rooms and blogs.

The new Chinese service at http://www.google.cn will offer a censored version of Google's popular search system that could restrict access to thousands of terms and Web sites.

Hot topics might include issues like independence for Taiwan or Tibet or outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong.

Microsoft's Bill Gates, in a rare case, even defended Google's decision:

"I do think information flow is happening in China ... "

Nevertheless, in a quick sample search of tibet, Google's china search Google.cn returns 2.6 million results less than Google's regular search engine.