Is that MySpace in the rear-view mirror, Twitter users may wonder? Why, yes, it is, at least in the UK. According to Hitwise, the web research company, the number of UK visits to Twitter exceeded that for MySpace in the UK for the last week of August.

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Ah, those collection societies just never learn, do they? We’ve discussed in the past how ASCAP once threatened the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire, but in the past few years it’s been ASCAP’s counterpart in the UK that’s been in the news the most for things like threatening small business owners after calling them on the phone and saying they hear music in the background or threatening a stable owner for playing the radio to her horses. I guess ASCAP was feeling a bit left out.

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A month ago Dennis Woodside was running Google’s (GOOG) U.K., Ireland and Benelux business out of London, thinking that’s where he and his family would be for at least a few more years. But that was before Tim Armstrong, Google’s president-Americas Operations, decamped for AOL (TWX) and Mr. Woodside was tapped as his replacement, to run Google’s business in the Americas region. Since then, he’s spent a week in New York, then California and then back in New York. Next week you’ll find him in London. And after that he’ll start the cycle all over again–a schedule he’ll pretty much live by until his family moves to the U.S. in July.

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The Q1 earnings period could be a tough one for networking equipment companies; estimates for the likes of Cisco (CSCO) and Juniper (JNPR) in particular have continued to edge lower. William Blair analyst Jason Ader this morning weighed in with updates on those two stocks and a couple of other following a late March survey with 36 VARs in the U.S. and the U.K. Ader joined the chorus of estimate cutters; but he sees improvement on the horizon.

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For the past five years, John Rennie has braved the towering waves of the North Atlantic Ocean to keep your email coming to you. As chief submersible engineer aboard the Wave Sentinel, part of the fleet operated by U.K.-based undersea installation and maintenance firm Global Marine Systems, Rennie–a congenial, 6-feet 4-inch, 57-year-old Scotsman–patrols the seas, dispatching a remotely operated submarine deep below the surface to repair undersea cables. The cables, thick as fire hoses and packed with fiber optics, run everywhere along the seafloor, ferrying phone and Web traffic from continent to continent at the speed of light.

The cables regularly fail. On any given day, somewhere in the world there is the nautical equivalent of a hit and run when a cable is torn by fishing nets or sliced by dragging anchors. If the mishap occurs in the Irish Sea, the North Sea or the North Atlantic, Rennie comes in to splice the break together.

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Five major U.K. carriers are banding together to pool customer data so that it can be put into a giant database and then be used to sell advertising, The Register reports today. How long do you think it will take before this “database” idea lands on American shores? First they charge you hundreds of dollars for calls, then they sell you for pennies.

This is no different than, say, Phorm, NebuAd or any of the other tricks being cooked up by service providers in a desperate attempt to recreate Google’s business model. In the process, they are playing loose and fast with people’s privacy. Jeez, no wonder people hate their phone companies.

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When the economy goes south, one name invariably surfaces on the lips of pundits and economists: John Maynard Keynes. That is because the twentieth century’s greatest economist is generally associated with the idea that markets require government intervention in order to function properly. During boom times, when the market seems to be working, no one has any use for Keynes’s skepticism toward unrestrained capitalism. But, during recessions–when the economy grinds to a halt and Washington suddenly looks like the only thing that can save it–Keynes invariably enjoys a revival. The current economic crisis, our country’s worst since the Great Depression, is no exception. Everyone, it seems, has spent the past months rediscovering Keynes.

But the tendency only to turn to Keynes for technical advice in bad times doesn’t really do justice to his worldview. Keynes’s ideas were not just a prescription for an ailing economy; they were a complete theory of capitalism, one meant to be relevant in both good times and bad. They were also more than just an economic program; his ideas about capitalism–spelled out most thoroughly in his 1936 work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money–were developed in tandem with his political philosophy. Keynes saw each as bound up with the other. “The most pressing reforms which are economically sound do not, as perhaps they did in earlier days, point away from the ideal,” Keynes wrote in 1932. “On the contrary, they point toward it.” Keynes, in other words, was interested in more than manipulating the levers of policy to keep economies thriving. He was interested in how economics intersects with political questions of equality and fairness and justice.

This fall, the Bush administration and the incoming Obama administration have had to confront not just narrow technical questions about budget deficits, interest rates, tax cuts, and savings, but also broader political questions about the proper relationship between government and the economy. Without our realizing or anticipating it, the entire panoply of concerns that Keynes faced in the 1930s has come back to us. Turning to him for answers is therefore an understandable, and wise, move–but only if we treat his ideas as what they are: not quick-fix steps for a battered market but long-term principles for creating a functional and just economy.

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The success of “graduated response” programs in the U.S., U.K., France, New Zealand and elsewhere around the world may depend, in large part, on just how quickly file sharers will buckle. If most will quit after a simple warning, the campaign to enlist ISPs (and back down on the mass legal threats) may be a huge success.

But, if only draconian sanctions like disconnection are enough to “stop the swap,” the entire graduated response program could arouse critical opposition from the public and from lawmakers. The European Parliament, which has already considered the issue, has voted several times against such “three strikes” laws, largely due to the possibility of extreme sanctions such as Internet disconnection.

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U.K. paper The Guardian this morning reports that Orange, the mobile phone operator owned by France Telecom, is considering yanking Research in Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry Bold from its handset lineup–presumably in the U.K. market–because of what the paper calls persistent software errors.

The curious fact of the article is that it cites no one–it is “understood,” in the passive voice, that the device will be discontinued by Orange. And the article is actually more about the BlackBerry Storm than the Bold.

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