The next generation of radio listeners might not remember the olden days of scrolling through stations by turning a knob on a car or home stereo. Instead, the radio they listen to could very well be on their mobile phones.

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Shortly after Tim Armstrong took over as chief executive of AOL, he asked to see the list of business deals that were being negotiated. He saw 900 of them.

It was too many by far. “If you looked through the deal sheet, would you have been able to see the strategy of the company?” he asked. “I had a hard time.”

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In the future, Amazon.com’s (AMZN) Kindle e-book reader will display more book formats beyond its own. And you should also expect to see Kindle books on a lot more devices.

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Susan Boyle, the latest overnight YouTube sensation, may well end up the recipient of a bonanza from her new status as unlikely heroine.

But for now, her dizzying YouTube success has been a missed opportunity to cash in.

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Boxee, a free software package that pulls together multiple sources of Internet video in an easy-to-use interface, has quietly been building an army of ardent fans.

But what is it about Boxee that is driving the technorati wild?

Turns out, more than a handful of the 600 or so people who filed into Webster Hall in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday evening for a free Boxee-focused event couldn’t quite put their finger on it either.

In fact, a number of them weren’t exactly sure what Boxee was.

Aarin Clemons, who won a Mac mini computer by performing a beatboxed song incorporating Boxee’s name during a talent show portion of the evening, confessed he’d never used the service. “My friends brought me here,” he said.

Vincent Polidoro, a 25-year-old filmmaker in New York who persuaded Mr. Clemons to attend the gathering, said he had recently joined the ranks of those who adore the service, which many people use to pipe video from a computer to a TV screen.

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A headline that kicked around the blogosphere this weekend made no sense to me: “Wolfram Alpha Is Coming–and It Could Be as Important as Google.” (GOOG)

The post–written by Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks–took a look at a new sort of search engine being cooked up in secret by Stephen Wolfram, a British mathematician.

Wolfram’s search engine, called Wolfram Alpha, is meant to be able to answer specific factual questions in a far more precise way than any search engine before it. For example, it will parse questions like “What is the location of Timbuktu?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” to answer the questions rather than simply pull up sites that have the answer on them.

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CNN’s live streaming of the inauguration next to a feed from Facebook is a powerful demonstration of how television can use social media and an equally powerful demonstration of what Facebook can do for various Web sites.

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The biggest question facing Windows 7 is whether Microsoft can really think small. When designing Windows Vista, Microsoft (MSFT) put a lot of effort into taking advantage of sophisticated computer hardware, with fancy graphics on the surface and lots of new processing tricks inside. Microsoft says this positioned the operating system for the future, despite the complaining of many users who grumble that Vista has bogged down their computers with unneeded frills and incompatibilities.

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The question is not whether the nation is overwhelmed with checking email and RSS feeds, answering calls, exchanging instant messages, surfing the Web, watching YouTube and playing that one game where you try to organize the falling blocks.

The question is how much money all of this costs.

Basex, a research firm, estimates in data published on Monday that information overload costs the economy $900 billion a year in lost productivity. And a new online calculator created by Basex professes to provide a rough estimate of the cost to individual companies.

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I’ve got to confess that for the last 10 years I’ve largely ignored Salesforce.com. I knew it was growing through sales of its service, a very fancy Rolodex that helps companies keep track of customers and prospects. And I knew it evangelized the idea that applications for big companies can be delivered through Web pages rather than as software run in a company’s own data center.

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Hollywood has the Oscars. Broadway has the Tonys. Now Twitter has the…Shorty Awards?

The awards, announced last week by the Brooklyn Internet company Sawhorse Media, aim to honor the best Twitterers of 2008 in categories like humor, news and food. Though the company has no formal connection to San Francisco-based Twitter, which allows people to post updates, or “tweets,” up to 140 characters in length, the idea seems to be taking off. “Shortyawards” is currently the most searched term on Twitter, and a number of users have taken a cue from the movie studios and kicked off aggressive lobbying campaigns.

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Intel (INTC) came up with a novel way to show how important the Internet and computing have become in the lives of Americans. In conjunction with Harris Interactive, the company conducted a survey of adults in the United States under the prosaic-enough banner, “Internet Reliance in Today’s Economy.”

But the first “key finding” from the study is a little more attention-grabbing. According to the study, 46 percent of women and 30 percent of men would opt to forgo sex for two weeks instead of giving up access to their precious Internet for the same period.

More broadly, those surveyed said access to the Internet ranked highest among the discretionary spending items they could not live without.

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The slogan of YouTube is “Broadcast Yourself.” I’ve got to wonder if many YouTube users are broadcasting information about their tastes in video far more widely than they understand.

Google’s (GOOG) video site lets you subscribe to a “channel”–a collection of videos from one person or company–so you can get reminders about new clips from sources that interest you. When you do this, your user name and photo are usually listed on the page of the channel you are subscribing to. And there is no way for you to keep your subscription private.

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At a recent press breakfast, someone asked top executives of Sony Electronics about their plans to let their televisions show video delivered by the Internet. While the company has an early effort, called the Bravia Internet Link, Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics in the United States, said the company can now introduce better products because it has reached an agreement with the cable industry.

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When Google released its Flu Trends service earlier this week, the Drudge Report flashed a headline that read: “SICK SURVEILLANCE: GOOGLE REPORTS FLU SEARCHES, LOCATIONS TO FEDS.”

Google sought to avoid this kind of reaction by talking about how Google Flu Trends protects the privacy of its users. The service relies “on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur each week,” Google said.

Still, the worries persist. On Wednesday, two advocacy groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Patient Privacy Rights, sent a letter to Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, raising privacy concerns: “The question is how to ensure that Google Flu Trends and similar techniques will only produce aggregate data and will not open the door to user-specific investigations, which could be compelled, even over Google’s objection, by court order or Presidential authority.”

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