When I was in first grade, I thought that war should really be settled by board game. So it comes as a welcome surprise to see that the rappers Bow Wow and The Game have decided to challenge each other not to a quickdraw, but to a game of "Madden '09." The stakes? $100k, to be donated by the loser to charity.

In a move that worked so well for the RIAA, five video game publishers -- Atari, Codemasters, Reality Pump, Techland and Topware Interactive -- have decided to go after 25,000 file-sharers who have been allegedly violating their intellectual property rights and distributing their games online.

Today's ephemeral buzz may very well be tomorrow's new wave of products. One of the buzz items that caught my attention this week was a leaked video of a potential virtual world connected to one of the MySpace co-founders, Brad Greenspan. This virtual world has an interesting angle -- it's built on an engine called OTOY, which is a graphics engine that does its rendering in a "cloud."

Second Life, which allows users an extremely high level of freedom compared to competing virtual worlds, is heading towards becoming more regulated. The big issues is advertising.

Rather than talking about one specific topic this week, I'm going to briefly mention several things that caught my eye....