Is it possible that the music industry has finally spotted the light at the end of the tunnel–and it’s not the flashing light on the oncoming Pirate Express locomotive?

This week a big piece of research has come up with two startling conclusions–that illegal downloading amongst young music fans has actually gone into a decline, and that the CD is still the most popular format, even amongst teenagers, and is not ready to be sent to the digital graveyard just yet.

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By any measure, he is among the most important figures in technology of the last decade, a major influence on the way we use and interact with computers and mobile phones, a British designer who ranks with the Conrans and the Dysons. But have you ever heard Jonathan Ive, the Apple (AAPL) designer behind the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, talk about his work?

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How worried are you about the amount of private and personal stuff you have posted on social-networking sites? I’ve always been pretty relaxed–both because I’m very careful about how much information I give away, and because I think I know my way around privacy settings.

But an investigation by my colleagues at Click has made me think again. They set out to explore just how much data is accessible to developers who make applications for Facebook. What they found was that it was relatively simple to write an application that would give the developer access to lots of personal data–not just from those who’ve installed that application, but also from their list of Facebook friends.

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It’s easy to forget that as well as being an extraordinarily innovative firm, Google is also rapidly becoming Britain’s biggest advertising business. The latest figures–released on Thursday evening–show how rapidly it is growing in the U.K., earning $803 million (about £407m) in the first three months of 2008, about 40% up on a year ago. Let’s put that into context. Last year, ITV’s net advertising revenue was £1.5 billion. So, even if you just multiply Google’s earnings by four and assume no further growth this year, Britain’s biggest commercial television business–the original “license to print money”–is about to be overtaken by an American upstart which only arrived in the U.K. in 2001.

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