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Virgin Mobile USA definitely walks to its own, very hip drumbeat. Big cell phone carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless are famous for herding customers into long-term service contracts. Virgin specializes in prepaid plans that allow its customers -- half of them under 35 -- to pay as they go, by the minute or by the month. That difference is what distinguishes Virgin, CEO Dan Schulman says.

It's no secret that individual privacy has already suffered since the Internet era began, but privacy law expert Daniel Solove believes things are likely to get even worse, and he illustrates his vision in living color with a wealth of examples from the here and now. In The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet, Solove begins his dark tale with the classic story of "dog poop girl."

James Mangano knows numbers. He's an accountant for a New York state agency and his job involves delving into piles of numbers and coming up with useful information. But the number that bedeviled him the most since last November was not on a spreadsheet; it was the toll-free customer service number for Verizon. The telecommunications company has driven this man to distraction.

There's been a lot of news in the past few weeks about Rhapsody.com, the much-buzzed-about music subscription site that brings a new twist to legally downloading music. The site offers unlimited access to music for a monthly fee, as opposed to the pay-per-song plan of iTunes. As a longtime, reasonably devoted iTunes user, I gave Rhapsody a spin to see if it could convince me to convert.