I am writing this live from the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle. Just saw a “band” called The Sancho Plan and they are mindblowing. Their web site is here. Hard to describe but they play electronic touch pads, making both music and video at the same time. Words fail. But they are worth checking out.

A brutal, ruthless monopolist resorts to hardball tactics, including lawsuits, license revocations, and finally its multibillion-dollar acquisition power to kill off upstart rivals. Nope, it’s not Microsoft. Great piece by Ashlee Vance in today’s NY Times about IBM killing off threats to its incredibly lucrative mainframe monopoly. Will be interesting to see how IBM responds. In the past they’ve often just gone dark on publications that run critical articles. That’s one reason you don’t often see anything negative about IBM in the press. (Another is that IBM also sometimes pulls its ads out of publications that step out of line editorially.) IBM views media relations as a form of advertising. If they’ve got some breakthrough in the labs, or some new product they’re hoping to hype, they’ll hand-pick a publication or two and tee up a story. They tell you what the story is; they set the agenda; they tell you which people at IBM you’re going to interview, and when; and every IBMer who gets interviewed has been scripted and rehearsed to death before you sit down with them. Nobody strays off message. Every interview is tape-recorded by IBM PR flacks. Those flacks write up a summary of every interview. That info gets used to prepare the subjects for the next interviews. If you’ve ever wondered why almost every story about IBM feels canned and pre-fabricated, that’s because it is.

Yes, the ultimate conquest is about to take place, as Sun launches a daring reverse takeover of IBM and completes its journey to rule the industry. This anyway is how I expect MLP might position the deal. Sure, IBM will try to describe it as buying up a weaker rival for a few billion dollars. But internally, the Kool-Aid drinkers at Sun will know better — what’s really happening is that IBM is finally waving the white flag of surrender, and Sun is just letting them save face. We’ll hear all about the incredible synergies, like how well MySQL (bought for $1 billion) will work with DB2 (ahem). Sadly I’ve been covering this stuff long enough to remember when Sun really did have the upper hand in this market and used to delight in bitch-slapping IBM around in the press. Like this story I did in 1999, where a Sun exec crowed that, “IBM’s problem isn’t Y2K. It’s S-U-N.” 

UPDATE: Much love to dear reader Fred Wilson (could it be the Fred Wilson?) who Photoshopped a ponytail onto the tiger tamer.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoiGJMZjs0o]

Check it out, people. My man Dan Frommer of Alley Insider is slowly gaining on his Apple-watching nemesis at AllThingsD, John Paczkowski. This morning at 7:16 a.m. PT, Paczkowski was the first to re-report the non-news coming out of some Chinese publication that Apple is preparing an oversized iPod Touch, aka a netbook. Just nine minutes later, at 10:25 a.m. ET, Frommer struck, re-reporting Paczkowski’s own re-report. It’s an amazing performance by Frommer, who last week was running a full ten minutes behind AllThingsD. Watch out, Kara Swisher! Can you hear the footsteps getting closer?

A couple things that make this gem even better — first, that this is total non-news, since no actual product has been announced yet, and since, believe it or not, the entire fate of the fucking world does not hang in the balance on whether Apple makes a new, slightly larger iPod. Second, that even the source from which Paczkowski re-reports, something called DigiTimes, was itself re-reporting something from another publication, Commercial Times. You can see the DigiTimes story here. So, to recap: Frommer re-reports something on Alley Insider that Paczkowski re-reports on AllThingsD that DigiTimes re-reports from Commercial Times. You gotta love the way the Internet takes all the friction and inefficiency out of the fusty old news business.

A reliable source at Microsoft informs me that this Maybach parked in a handicapped space belongs to Salesforce.com CEO (and supposed student of Eastern religion) Marc Benioff. This happened at the Borg’s Silicon Valley campus where Benioff was attending a TechCrunch roundtable. Photo was snapped and Twittered by someone else at the show. See the original photo here and the Twitter feed here. I’m just taken aback that a humble, modest guy like Marc “Bodhisattva” Benioff would drive a Maybach. Somehow I pictured him in a Prius. Or a Tesla. Or maybe a dozen Teslas, yoked together, just to be extra extra extra good to the planet. But a Maybach? A big old stinky German ubersedan with 600 horsepower and a $400,000 price tag? Who’d have imagined?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boMqAHTDZbw&hl=en&fs=1]

I just discovered this cool video on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. Go check it out here. Guy takes random YouTube music clips and combines them into a mashup. Brilliant.

To save you the trouble of reading them all, here are the highlights.

Palm earnings suck. See AllThingsD, or for a vastly different take, AlleyInsider. 

Amazon does a Kindle app for iPhone. See AllThingsD, TechCrunch, or VentureBeat.

A bigshot is leaving MySpace. See AllThingsD (6:15 p.m . ET last night), Alley Insider (6:25 p.m. ET, a full ten minutes later), GawkerWag (7:14 p.m. ET), TechCrunch (no time stamp but seems to be a few hours later). 

I wrote recently about how the economics of blogging kind of sucks. But I neglected to mention the fine contribution to journalism and world knowledge that blogs represent. One of the great things about the blogosphere is the unique information that each blog provides. For example, today Apple announced some new machines. In the old days you’d just have to read about that in the newspaper. Today you can set up a feed reader or just bookmark a bunch of blogs and get really exciting, nearly identical, not-in-depth coverage of this same momentous news. Check it out from AllThingsD (see here), Alley Insider (see here), TechCrunch (see here), and VentureBeat (see here.) Lest you think that there are probably too many people covering the exact same non-news every day, remember that every blog has its own very unique value to add to the basic underlying non-news. VentureBeat, for example, used the opportunity to point out its own mistakes, saying that today’s news probably means there won’t be some big Apple event at the end of March, as it had predicted earlier. AllThingsD says it’s all about the recession. Alley Insider says Apple still needs a netbook, and predicts will see a multitouch tablet from Apple by end of year. Or consider the story about Jon Stewart covering Twitter on The Daily Show. The blogs are chasing each other’s tails on that one too, with VentureBeat offering this piece, TechCrunch offering this piece, GawkerWag offering this, and GigaOm offering this. No mystery why nobody is making any money at this.