The revenue streams of some media companies face a potential threat from Starz Encore Group and RealNetworks joining up to create a new service for movie lovers.

RealNetworks and the Starz Encore Group will introduce an online service today that will let high-speed Internet users download and watch many of the movies shown on the Starz cable channel. The move is another early attempt by Hollywood to build a business out of downloadable movies and head off the sort of piracy that has hurt the music industry.

When the computer age began, some people warned that the rise of word-processing systems would mean the decline of skillful writing. The idea was that computers would make writing so automatic and easy - yeah, sure -that fine points of thought and language would be buffed away, leaving depersonalized, machinelike prose.

On- and offline classifieds player IPIX AdMission has rolled out an Internet classifieds platform that, if successful, will let businesses place rich ads on regional newspaper Web sites.

Nike's new "Art of Speed" blog on gawker.com is a public experiment that other marketers will watch closely. The results of this collaboration could reveal a lot about whether a mainstream marketer can marry its message to the hip, satirical content of a blog such as Gawker, and, in doing so, gain access to the influential, early adopter blogging crowd.

ESPN and other Web sites, eyeing the successes search engines have had with ads based on keywords, are exploring a new form of targeting that's tied to their visitors' online habits.

Microsoft has filed eight lawsuits under the federal CAN-SPAM act against so-called top spammers. The suit alleges violations of the act including spoofing and falsifying of domains, routing e-mail through open proxies and using misleading subject lines.

A group of big music stores has mothballed a plan to join forces on the Internet to fight online services such as Apple Computer's iTunes, a move that highlights painful choices brought on by a digital shakeout.

Comcast, the nation's largest broadband Internet service, this week began selectively blocking a network loophole commonly exploited by spammers.

Today, Google is the most important story in the technology business. If Google can sprinkle enough stardust, it can enable Wired to reclaim its buzz. (If it can't, maybe nothing will).