• Federal judge on school suspensions. The 10-day suspension of two eighth-graders in a Pennsylvania school was in response to their creation of an imposter MySpace profile representing their principal "as a pedophile and a sex addict, among other things," ArsTechnica.com reports. In its coverage of the ruling, the Student Press Law Center reports that US District Judge James "wrote in his opinion that the arguments fell into three categories: 1) Were Snyders' First Amendment rights violated by the school?; 2) Were the district's policies unconstitutionally vague and overbroad?; 3) And did the school violate the Snyder's parental rights?" He answered all three in the negative, saying the oft-used Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District was about the censoring of political speech not the "lewd and vulgar" speech in the fake profile. An attorney for the ACLU said the judge "failed to recognize that a school cannot restrict a student's speech 'anywhere it is uttered' simply because it's vulgar and targets a school official."
• Turning music biz upside down - again. First there was iTunes selling single tunes at 99 cents a pop; then you could rent digital songs for a monthly subscription; now there's the way of MySpace, with free tunes "brought to you by...." (right, advertising). The new MySpace Music has launched. With it, the Washington Post reports, the free tunes "can be played only on personal computers connected to the Internet.... Anyone who wants to transfer a song to a portable device like Apple Inc.'s iPod will have to buy the music through Amazon.com Inc.'s year-old downloading service, which sells songs for as little as 79 cents apiece." The music sold via MySpace won't contain DRM-style copy protection, which makes it more share-able - as MySpace leverages what the social Web is all about: sharing stuff with your friends. Warner Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and EMI Music are all participating, as are Sony ATV/Music Publishing and The Orchard. Independent labels (representing about 9% of the US digital-recorded music market) want in too, apparently - the Financial Times reports.
• Mobile Web's arrived. "The mobile Web is here, and it's huge," reports Chris O'Brien in the San Jose Mercury News. This from a reporter who started covering telecommunications in 1999 and heard at countless mobile industry trade shows that "next year is when the mobile Internet really takes off." As evidence, sure there's the iPhone nearing its goal of selling 10 million unites, the coming new, non-business-y versions of the BlackBerry, Google's new Android OS for mobile phones, and the "countless developers rushing to build new applications" for phones. "But more than anything, my recognition of this moment is based on personal experience." His latest phone is his mobile computer, where he manages all his email in odd moments, reads his news, comments on friends' profiles, sends his Twitter tweets, posts to his blog, snaps and sends loads of pictures, and - through GPS-enabled software called Telenav - finds the nearest ATM or coffee spot wherever he is. Add game-playing, which is not on Chris's list, and you're looking at how our kids use phones. See "Tweens are into phones", with Nielsen Mobile research showing that 26% of US 8-to-12-year-olds owning cellphones (46% using them) and 77% of US 13-to-17-year-olds owning them.
• Battle of the MMOGs? I'm referring to massively multiplayer online games, and the "battle" that's shaping up is between 10 million-member World of Warcraft and just-launched Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. USATODAY says the newcomer might "siphon off" some of WoW's success, but there's probably room - if not in players' schedules, then - in the huge and growing MMOG market for a lot of new games. A few facts about MMOGs in general and WoW in particular: The US market alone (WoW has players in many countries) is "expected to amount to about $800 million this year," up from $700 million last year and $332 million in 2004," USATODAY reports, citing data from market researcher DFC Intelligence. WoW players spend $40-60 up front to buy the game's software, then $15/month to play. Warhammer is published by Electronic Arts and was created by Mythic Entertainment.
• Great cross-pollination. This really makes sense: a new research lab that brings together experts in technology, sociology, physics, economists, psychologists, and social media - even digital ethnography - doing both quantitative and qualitative research. Microsoft is establishing this research lab in Cambridge, Mass., at a time, I think, when interdisciplinary work has never been needed more. So far the facility "has a team of 33 researchers, students and interns ... from MIT, Harvard, Stanford University and Hebrew University," Computerworld reports." One project lab director Jennifer Chayes describes is the development of "math models that account for [digital ethnographer danah boyd's] observations [through thousands of interviews with teen social networkers] about the way social networks are layered, and that there are different kinds of friendships." We can only hope Microsoft will share findings that would advance public discussion and understanding.

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