4650 words since my last update, including most of another article for Semiconductor Magazine, but also some set dressing for the Venice project. That gives me 193,320 for the year so far, and a good chance of breaking through 200,000 this month. Go me!

Remember convergence? That was the idea that the Internet and TV would merge, with people watching combined packages of programming and interactive features. It mostly flopped, because even customers who liked the features weren't willing to pay for them.

Convergence is back, and it looks more like the Internet than anyone expected. With intelligent program guides and digital recorders, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want. Great news for viewers, terrible news for business models based on mass audiences.

The same thing has already happened to radio. The radio reception in my office is lousy, so I listen to last.fm instead. It lets me decide how much and what kind of variety I want, instead of being at the mercy of program directors and record company promotion budgets. (On the downside, there is a random element, and I do sometimes get things that sound like cats being tortured. Wince.)

It only took five years, but mainstream news sites are realizing that offsite links build traffic and allowing reporters to point readers to other sites. It's about time.

(Link by way of TechDirt.)

Morris Chang, TSMC's CEO, is predicting that overcapacity in China will spark the next chip industry slump, probably in late 2005 or early 2006. That shouldn't come as a surprise to readers of these pages. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have all walked the same path of rapid construction to gain market share, followed by a market glut and falling prices. Now it's China's turn.

Harrumph. As part of a redesign, SiliconStrategies.com has put all their content in a registration required box. Which seems like an appropriate excuse to mention Mailinator, the free temporary email address.

Yes, I'm still tracking my word count. Got a slow start in September, thanks to a much needed vacation, but I'm still plugging.

As of August 31, I had a grand total of 183,720 words since January 1, 21,705 of them in August. That means I need to average almost 30,000 per month for the rest of the year to get to my goal of 300,000. The good news is that boosting my daily goal to 1500 words (from 1,000) is working out so far, so I should be able to catch up a little bit.

For September so far, I only have 4950 words, again thanks to that vacation. Total of 188,670 since January 1.

Rick Munarriz comments on the inherent conflicts of interest in the RIAA's position on file sharing. Among them, AOL (a division of Time Warner) is trying hard to sell broadband services, while Sony's playback devices support MP3s. He also notes that not one of the RIAA's 261 worst file sharers targeted for lawsuits is an AOL subscriber. Hmmm...