Life won't ever be quite the same for people who live on the Gulf Coast, as daily online and TV footage reveal. Now we have online aerial pictures to compare the before and after, courtesy of MSNBC.com, which scrambled to put together some really cool block-by-block interactive maps.

In a summer of consolidation rumors, today's New York Post reports that one of the biggest deals in the industry is in the works. The paper's saying that Microsoft is in "advanced" talks to buy a stake in America Online from Time Warner.

So, our European brothers and sisters are wild about downloading music. Just how wild? According to a new report by researcher Generator, Europeans will spend $640 million in 2010 downloading music tracks to their mobile phones. Generator projects that spending on music ringtones is another $1.2 billion, making music downloads to mobile phones a $1.8 billion market--or 15 percent of total music sales by 2010, compared with just 3.4 percent in 2005.

In a bizarre turn of events, Geico has now started sending cease-and-desist letters to companies that use the keyword "Geico" to trigger search ads, according to Advertising Age.

A jailed Chinese journalist. A leading Internet company. What happened here, and can we expect more of these types of incidents? Shi Tao was slapped recently with a 10-year jail sentence for passing on a censorship order from the Chinese government via his Yahoo! e-mail account.

News sites have pulled out all the stops in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina--as well they should. They have a chance to show the full gamut of what they're capable of offering--video clips, interviews, slide shows, blogs, podcasts, you name it.

Geico and Google finally settled the remnants of a trademark infringement suit that's been kicking around since May of 2004. The terms are confidential, but it's a safe bet that Google didn't give away the house here. For all practical purposes, Google won the lawsuit last December, after Geico presented its evidence at trial. Federal district court judge Leonie Brinkema had earlier ruled that, in theory, Google's keyword bidding practices potentially violated Geico's trademark. That is, she ruled that Google's policy of allowing Geico rivals to bid for their ads to appear when consumers queried on the keyword "Geico" …

What a demoralizing week for the nation. Shameful, really. Four years after 9/11 and our unpreparedness for a disaster, any disaster, was as conspicuous as it was nauseating. And what a twisted irony that we couldn't get to those Americans who needed help most, because the necessary resources were already committed to a war that's been left to those same lower-class Americans to fight. This platform, I know, now calls for a transition to some list of lessons learned and how they apply to Internet advertising, but the only lesson here seems to be that we haven't learned any. …

In 2002, Microsoft finally settled a longstanding antitrust case brought by the federal government. Who'd have imagined that just three years later, the Redmond, Wash. behemoth would be back in court, this time arguing that a judge should prevent a former Microsoft executive from joining a rival company? Microsoft has accused Google of poaching Kai-Fu Lee, who had signed a contract promising not to work for any Microsoft rivals for at least one year after leaving the company.

The online data related to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is pouring in from every possible direction today. Here are a few important nuggets for your consideration: comScore Networks reports that for the average weekday in the week preceding the storm, approximately 700,000 people used the Internet in New Orleans. Not surprisingly, on Monday, August 29, that number dropped more than 80 percent below the average level. By Aug. 30, that decline had reached 90 percent.