The epic battle for viewers that has been raging for more than a decade between cable and satellite television may end up with both being losers, analysts said yesterday. The winner may be the computer.

"We want to create a detail page for every business in America." That's how Amazon's Barnaby Dorfman, who led development for A9's yellow pages, describes the retailer's experiments in local search -- efforts that hold great promise for local businesses eager to market themselves online.

Web giant Yahoo is poised to launch a new digital store and music player, aiming to compete more directly with Apple Computer's successful iTunes service, according to sources familiar with the project.

Internet Yellow Pages providers have fallen behind in the battle for the local search audience and will need to partner broadly to remain competitive in 2005, according to a study by Forrester Analyst Charlene Li.

In the physical world, being labeled a journalist may confer little prestige and may even evoke some contempt. But being a journalist can also confer certain privileges, like the right to keep sources confidential. And for that reason many bloggers, a scrappy legion of online commentators and pundits, would like to be considered reporters, too. A lawsuit filed in California by Apple Computer is drawing the courts into that question: who should be considered a journalist?

The Internet surpassed radio as a source for political news in the United States last year as more people went online to keep up with the presidential election campaign, according to a new report released on Sunday.

Another signal moment for bloggers is to occur this morning, when Garrett M. Graff, who writes a blog about the news media in Washington, is to be ushered into the White House briefing room to attend the daily press "gaggle."

A judge dismissed a felony spamming conviction that had been called one of the first of its kind, saying he found no "rational basis" for the verdict and wondering if jurors were confused by technical evidence.

Yahoo and Google help you block pop-up and pop-under ads. So do AOL and EarthLink. Mozilla Firefox, the populist web browser, has a built-in pop-up ad suppresser. Not to be outdone, Microsoft offers one in its Windows XP Service Pack 2. Google the term "pop-up blocker" and you'll encounter millions of results and hundreds -- if not thousands -- of products and services, with names like Pop-Up Stopper, Pop Swatter, Pop This and Pop-Up Zapper. You can download them in exchange for filling out consumer surveys, participating in various data-mining schemes and targeted ad campaigns, or paying an annual fee …

A new generation of start-ups is taking a page from Apple Computer's iTunes playbook, allowing Net radio listeners to draw their programming at will from one another's hard drives.