Okay, I'm officially pissed off - my home computer is now infected with a parasite that has spawned tons of pop-up ads, myriad offers to resolve the problem, and alerts from Microsoft trying to advise me about how to tackle the situation.

Okay, here's a new one - "cyberbullying."

We mentioned last week that the online holiday shopping season was rather robust, according to data from various researchers including comScore Networks, which yesterday released its holiday and full year (2004) online spending figures.

America Online today said it's renaming its cable music video channel "AOL Music On Demand," representing the latest in a series of moves designed to direct a wider Web audience to AOL content. AOL's cable music video channel was formerly dubbed "My Music Channel."

Yesterday the Minute addressed online holiday shopping and the fact that several research organizations noted robust increases for the recently passed November-December period, versus the same period a year ago.

Online shopping tallies for the holiday period have come in courtesy of eMarketer which today reports that its own projection of a 29 percent increase in sales from November through December, was on the money.

People around the world have flocked to humanitarian Web sites in the last week to donate funds to relief organizations aiding victims of the tsunami.

The tally is in on online holiday shopping. Shoppers spent a whopping $23.2 billion online from November 1 to December 26, up 25 percent from the same period a year ago.

Welcome to 2005, three days in. We are still processing last year's trends, blogging being one. Blogs surely entered the mainstream in 2004, a trend spurred in part by presidential politics, according to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The Pew study notes that 27 percent of Internet users say they read blogs in November, versus 17 percent in a survey conducted in February. News events, high-profile court cases, and major catastrophes like the tsunami in South Asia also drive awareness of blogging and blog readership.