Savvy online marketers have a whole new medium to exploit: It's called "podcasting." Could this be the next BMWFilms.com?

Juanita Swedenburg is an unlikely Internet revolutionary. The owner of a small family winery on a 130-acre cattle farm in Middlesburg, Va., she admits she doesn't browse the Web or even own a computer. "That's for the younger generation," she said. Yet a lawsuit that Swedenburg has filed could revolutionize the way alcohol is sold over the Internet. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments in the case, brought jointly by the Swedenburg Winery and the Lucas Winery in Lodi, Calif.

Computer-security experts, including former government officials, urged the Bush administration on Tuesday to devote more effort to strengthening defenses against viruses, hackers and other online threats.

Companies that use free software downloads to target Web surfers with annoying ads are turning on each other to keep customers--and the cash they generate--for themselves.

DuPont Registry, a magazine publisher of luxury classifieds, is replicating its monthly publications on the Internet to give readers the same experience online. The St. Petersburg, FL, company is using E-Book Systems Inc.'s Digital Flip technology to create online magazines for its titles on upscale automobiles, homes and boats. The magazines are available at dupontregistry.com.

It used to be one of the great free pleasures in New York to go into Tiffany & Company in the afternoon and hear the pens tapping on the counters. Each rap of a salesman's ballpoint signaled the sale of a diamond ring or a pair of cuff links. It intoned happiness and solvency, and, since Tiffany was not the sort of place to expose a customer to the indecency of baring his wallet in public, it summoned a manager, who performed the actual transaction at a discreet distance.

Online ad technology firm DoubleClick will discontinue its SiteAdvance Web site analytics product, and try to migrate its 50 existing clients to new partner Omniture's SiteCatalyst. DoubleClick said it analyzed the analytics market and found its own product wanting. It provided marketing campaign-oriented analytics but wasn't competitive in providing data about site-specific behaviors.

Time Warner said Monday that its America Online Internet unit, once seen as the company's red-headed stepchild, could contribute some of the company's most explosive revenue growth.

Just a year ago, blogs were viewed as a collection of off-the-cuff ramblings in cyberspace read mainly by online devotees. Then, as the election season heated up, bloggers gained new prominence, writing up-to-the-minute news and politics nuggets that the mainstream media struggled to match. Suddenly, millions of Americans were turning to political blogs such as instapundit.com and journalist Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish. And blogs about everything from art-world gossip to macroeconomics are drawing audiences, too. A new medium, though still a work in progress, is coming into being.

Some Internet shoppers who tried to visit Amazon.com on Monday were unable to access the popular book, electronic and toy sales Web site due to an undisclosed problem, which produced the error message "http//1.1 service unavailable" on-and-off during the day.