The good buzz on the nascent business of word-of-mouth marketing holds that it offers a low-cost, highly effective way to drum up positive chatter around a brand. The bad is that some of its more insidious practices could lead marketers to run afoul of longstanding advertising law.

Internet search giant Google, which in the last week has offered to give free wireless Internet service to San Francisco and announced plans to build a sprawling new campus, is continuing its march toward dominating computer desktops. Google is teaming with Sun Microsystems in what Sun on Monday called a "collaborative effort." If Google and Sun successfully team up to offer a compelling application over the Web - say, an alternative to Microsoft Office - it could pose a major threat to the world's largest software maker.

Is word-of-mouth marketing a short- or long-term strategy? If you take at face value what many agencies and buzz-marketing firms say, you'd conclude buzz is a quick-fix strategy that can be plucked off the shelf and put to immediate use. You might also conclude it's possible to jump rudely into someone else's conversation and reroute the dialogue in the direction of the marketing pitch. After all, results are what matter, right?

In-game advertising generated a 60 percent lift in awareness for new products in a study conducted by Nielsen Interactive Entertainment for in-game ad agency Double Fusion.

Yahoo Inc. is set on Monday to unveil a consortium that aims to make books, audio and video more easily accessible online, while addressing publishers' objections about the dangers to copyright. The non-profit Internet Archive, libraries at the University of California and the University of Toronto and technology suppliers Hewlett-Packard Co. and Adobe Systems Inc. are among the founders of the group.

The market for music downloads and other digital forms of music has tripled in a year, helping offset a continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physicial formats, an industry report said Monday. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry estimated that digital music sales totaled $790 million in the first half of this year, equivalent to 6 percent of industry sales, compared to $220 million in the same period a year earlier.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp has held talks to buy Amsterdam-based Trader Classified Media in a potential $2.5 billion deal. U.S. Internet giants Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. were named as other potential suitors in media reports last month.

Internet and software rivals like Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. aren't the only ones tracking Google. Big media and telecommunications companies also are on the lookout, realizing they too may face a looming threat. The theories about Google's next move are all over the map.