Reuters - Video clips of a Japanese police crackdown on a group of “working poor” who tried to get a look at the wealthy prime minister’s luxurious private home in Tokyo have attracted of thousands of viewers on the Internet.

AP - Facing more pressure to profit from its huge audience, YouTube is letting advertisers promote their commercial clips alongside the search results at the Internet’s most popular video site.

NewsFactor - Once thought to be a distraction, the Internet and cell phones are now central components of modern family life. So says a new national survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

AP - Netflix Inc.’s third-quarter profit surged 30 percent amid slowing subscriber growth that’s turning into a bigger problem for the online DVD rental leader as the rapidly unraveling economy prods more consumers clamp down on entertainment expenses.

InfoWorld - As we’ve seen time and again, in an increasing number of enterprise software categories, open source has become a promising alternative to commercial software. But there’s no free ride.

NewsFactor - As IBM sets out to launch its Bluehouse corporate social network to compete with Cisco and Google, word comes that Facebook and MySpace are the most popular social-networking sites for mobile-phone users.

AP - Video game rivals Sony and Microsoft are going head-to-head in virtual worlds for their home consoles later this year.

AP - When Yahoo Inc. co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang spurned Microsoft Corp.’s rich buyout offer this spring, he promised brighter days in Sunnyvale were just over the horizon.

AP - Like a lot of 20-year-olds, Kae Takahashi has a page on U.S.-based MySpace, and there is no mistaking it for anyone else’s.

AP - MySpace’s new music service managed to bring major record labels together, but a group that licenses song rights for thousands of independent labels feels left out and angry, partly because indie musicians were a big reason the social networking site rose to prominence in the first place.