Adam Thierer in Technology Liberation Front has a nice overview of the recent raft of books on the internet. Thierer presents a schema grouping optimists and pessimists, and books by their beliefs/themes.

I just saw this piece from Fortune reporting that Lawrence Lessig is predicting a catastrophic online event within the next decade that will prompt the US government to unveil an already-written bill similar to the PATRIOT Act which will grant the Fed additional powers in Internet surveilance and investigation. Evidently, Lessig got this information from a counterterrorism expert:

Lee Drutman has a good review in the July 5 LA Times of a book with a really long title. In fact, since I am on the internets so often doing the google and other stuff, this title is actually longer than my attention span enables me to read.

Digg reports that Walmart's new $199 gOS Linux desktop PC is getting good reviews over at Walmart (note that it is currently sold out). Anyone can take the gOS for a test drive if they'd like without purchasing the Walmart machine.

I suspect that the number of reviews over at the Walmart product pages is more viral Linux promotion on the part of Linux advocates than actual product purchaser/user reviews. It certainly suggests the potential of user reviews for marketing and is related to the shift in marketing predicted by IBM's new report, The End of Advertising as We Know It. It's worth reading the exec summary PDF of IBM's report; IBM's analysis is heavily influenced by the effects of multimedia and digital technology use.