before Australians generally and our government in particular understand that the term "Global Warming" does mean, "Optional Policy Direction" or "Expensive Luxury That Will Damage The Economy"?

One man has died, as many as 100 homes have been destroyed in the nation's capital and hundreds of people have been evacuated from resorts in the Snowy Mountains as bush fires razed vast tracts of Australia's south-east today.

And most of the best and most interesting innovation is going on outside the web because the web itself has become a corrupted and rapidly decaying protocol on the Internet.

The brainless ruling on the Sonny Bono act is clogging up the creativity pipes at one end while at the other end, last July, Danish search Engine "Newsbooster was ordered by the Bailiff's Court of Copenhagen to stop deep linking to newspaper articles on three Danish newspapers' Internet sites. The court found that Newsbooster's deep linking was in violation of European Community copyright laws.

rather than give in to this travesty of the Internet mind set, Newsbooster did what any intelligent provider of Internet services would do, an end-run. They have now built a desktop client that enables users to gain direct (not referred) access to information from their search engine database.

Score 10 for innovation, minus 10 for control freaks who continue to avoid "getting it" with a single mindedness you have to admire.

While we are on interesting desktop clients, the latest Blog News reader is a Russian effort called Syndirella.

I have been saying for 5 years now that the web is only a transitional stage in the development of the net. Until the last few months I had no idea what the next phase would be. Blogs it is.