Consumers in New York and Michigan are free to have wine from out-of-state wineries shipped directly to them thanks to yesterday's 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn laws in those states.

Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons said he'd consider spinning off AOL as a separate stock if the division's latest strategy doesn't pan out, according to the latest issue of Fortune magazine.

Why are activists such great marketers? We "real" marketers have billions of dollars. They have pennies. Yet activists always seem to get the sky-high return on investment (ROI) when trying to get a message across. Every time an activist trumps, co-ops, or outmaneuvers the "system," I get a weird, insecure feeling, as if I were a marketing phony.

The amount of digital music, video and other entertainment content available on the Internet is at an all-time high, but finding something compelling is getting harder than ever. As a result, the demand for more sophisticated Internet search tools that can match text-based queries with visual- or audio-based content like movies or music is on the rise.

Microsoft Corp., the world's largest maker of software, on Sunday released the finalized version of its desktop search tool, taking aim at Google Inc. and other rivals in the increasingly competitive search market. The MSN Search Toolbar, which was introduced on a trial basis five months ago, provides a way to search for e-mail, documents and other data stored on hard drives much more quickly and efficiently than the "Find" function found in Windows.

Bloggers are often touted as influential instigators, feeding buzz-worthy topics to the mainstream media they so disdain, and even guiding discussion in other communication channels. Not so, says a new study analyzing the impact of political blogs on the national conversation leading up to the 2004 presidential election. Indeed, Buzz, Blogs, and Beyond: The Internet and the National Discourse in the Fall of 2004 concludes that, while a force to be reckoned with, blogs are merely cogs in the meme machine.

San Francisco radio station 1550 KYCY-AM began airing programming on Monday created exclusively by listeners with podcast technology, as new and old media start to collide.

When David Yang recently looked for a new apartment in Chicago, he took an aerial tour of the city. As a 22-year-old on a limited budget, Yang couldn't afford to hire a helicopter for his visual inspection of Chicago. Instead, he turned to HousingMaps, a hack that combines craigslist real estate listings with city maps from Google Maps. It lets users pinpoint locations, along with one-click access to photos and descriptions, of dozens of available apartments in more than 20 North American cities.

Warren Spector, who's been developing games for more than 25 years, has mixed feelings about the eagerly anticipated Xbox and PlayStation game systems. The erstwhile studio director of Ion Storm, responsible for titles ranging from "Wing Commander" to "Deus Ex," thinks the new video game systems will be a player's paradise. With high-definition graphics, incredibly fast processors and surround sound, the experience will be leaps and bounds beyond anything console gamers have seen before.

I stayed up all night Monday reading Smut: A Sex Industry Insider (and Concerned Father) Says Enough Is Enough by Gil Reavill. Reavill is a journalist who started his career at porn rag Screw before going on to write for Penthouse and Maxim. He's also a father and co-author (with Jean Zimmerman) of Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls' Lives. He's no prude, and he's no extremist. But he is tired of the porn creep that has turned mainstream entertainment into a sex-saturated parody of itself.