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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For people who hope the openness and flexibility of the Internet will come to mainstream television, the deal announced yesterday between Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner (TWX) is great news. They just don’t see yet how it blows apart the tight bond between cable content and cable delivery.

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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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After writing about how Napster renegotiated its deals with record labels to offer its music subscription service at a lower price, I called RealNetworks (RNWK), which offers the Rhapsody service, to see if its executives were excited about cutting similar deals that would allow it to offer its own $5-a-month music service. For years, after all, people trying to popularize music subscriptions–which allow you to listen to anything you want for a monthly fee–have been telling me the concept is great but the price the record labels want is too high.

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On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, as the New Yorker cartoon famously said. But what if, while you are surfing, you want to prove your pedigree?

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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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In 2001, the last time the Internet ad market crashed, the biggest publishers figured one thing they could do to make the best of things is to make it easier for marketers to buy ads on Web sites. They created standard sizes for banner ads and other formats, through the Interactive Advertising Bureau. That way, an ad created for one site could easily be run on others.

Now some publishers, at least, think that those very standards are now at the root of the industry’s current problems.

When I met up with Charles Tillinghast, the president of MSNBC.com, the other day, he was just coming back from an advertising sales call. So I started by asking how business was going.

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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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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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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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There’s something about the crisp autumn air that brings out the philosopher in Mark Zuckerberg. At this week’s Web 2.0 Summit, the Facebook founder mused, according to Saul Hansell of the New York Times, “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

Hansell dubs this Zuckerberg’s Law. But I believe it’s actually Zuckerberg’s Second Law. Zuckerberg’s First Law, enunciated on another fall day almost precisely one year ago, took this elemental form: “Once every hundred years media changes.”

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Apple investors freaked out Monday, in part because two Wall Street analysts downgraded the stock. They are worried that margins will be compressed and sales of Macintosh computers and iPhones will be less than expected.

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T-Mobile raised some eyebrows Tuesday when it disclosed that buyers of its highly touted new Internet phone, the HTC G1 that uses Google’s Android software, would face restrictions if they exceeded 1 gigabyte of cellular data a month. That’s no problem for people who simply check their email. But heavy users of photos and online video–just the sort of thing that the super fancy G1 is meant for–might find that limit a problem.

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