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Microsoft’s Office XP is officially available. Yawn. Here are ZDNet’s reviews of the various applications. The short version: the biggest new feature is a licensing scheme that will make more money for Microsoft. It even has David Coursey reconsidering his anti-Microsoft-breakup stance.

According to an AP story, this year’s BookExpo America show will focus on old-fashioned values rather than last year’s dot-com hype. It’s a shame the “bubble burst” is causing perfectly valid technologies like e-books to slow down, although the e-book industry did need the same dose of realism that the rest of the e-economy did.

Newsbytes reports that Microsoft’s MSN search engine is gaining on Yahoo and Google, based on referrer traffic. This doesn’t agree with my own results, but it might mean something.

The World Wide Web turned 10 years old this week, according to Slashdot, but it appears the mainstream media hasn’t noticed, probably because they think the Web appeared out of nowhere in 1995. Meanwhile, someone is predicting the death of the Web again. Yawn.

Sorry for the lack of news. I returned this week from the Networld/Interop show, and the less said about the exciting new products previewed there the better. Regular updates will continue starting today.

In what looks to me like a publicity stunt, Napster relative Aimster is preemptively suing the recording industry. Meanwhile, Aimster founder Johnny Deep is using his 16-year-old daughter as a spokesmodel. Napster is starting to look downright respectable.

A few days after saying that Netscape should just give up, ZDNet’s David Coursey points out that AOL’s ownership of Netscape might finally be an asset. Interesting conjecture, but we’ll have to see what AOL does.

ICANN has completed negotiations for the .BIZ and .INFO domain suffixes, and pundits are expecting a land rush. I’m not so sure. (more…)

Lernout and Hauspie, the company that makes my favorite voice-recognition software, has been having legal and financial troubles for years. Now the founders themselves are in jail, according to CNET. I don’t know what I’ll do if they go out of business.

Wired News has a detailed article on the bizarre, weirdly subtle marketing campaign in progress for the movie A.I.. I wish I had the time to browse through hundreds of fictional sites looking for clues.