Beijing: Traffic lights here are notoriously unpredictable, in part because police try to ensure government leaders and visiting VIPs enjoy unimpeded transit around the city.

The result is that ordinary motorists at major junctions often find themselves sitting in front of a red light with no idea when it might change to green - and if it does, whether it will stay that way long enough to cross.

No doubt that’s how Wikipedia is feeling. After being blocked by the Great Firewall for a year, the cooperative encyclopedia’s non-Chinese versions became available to web-surfers in China last month, followed last week by the local-language edition.

The apparent change of heart by Beijing’s secretive censors prompted speculation they now plan more tightly targeted blocking of specific Wikipedia entries, such as the one that discusses the government’s bloody suppression of popular protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

(See informed discussion of Wikipedia’s unblocking here).

Mere partial blocking would be good news for China’s budding army of Wikipedians, but no sooner had thousands of would-be contributors signed on than the traffic light suddenly changed back to red; on Friday all editions of Wikipedia were unavailable from China.

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So if you beat the queues and paid $599 for a PS3, you have a bargain on your hands, according to iSuppli, which prices the components at $840, and you have a potential gold mine, according to eBay.

As of 3pm, 15 hours after it went on sale in the US, 792 PlayStation 3 consoles have been sold today for an average selling price of $2,716.59, according to eBay’s Marketplace Research tool.

Since its availability on eBay in pre-sale from October 17,  3,608 PS3s have been sold at an average price of $1,901.67.

Already, fresh lines are forming for the launch of the Nintendo Wii on Sunday and there is even a queue of people camping opposite the bureau here outside Niketown, for the latest pair of sneakers. 

The consumer secondary market has never had it so good.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

"You’re never as smart or as dumb as everyone says you are."

That was Ross Levinsohn, head of News Corp’s internet business, last week. With MySpace under his belt he looked like the smartest guy in the room. Now he’s out.

Richard Waters, San Francisco

Bill Gates, the Washington State guy who has fought enough battles in Silicon Valley over the years with the likes of Apple, Sun and Intel,  ended his day here on Wednesday receiving a standing ovation and an award for his philanthropy.
He was given the 2006 James C Morgan Global Humanitarian Award at a dinner at the Tech Museum in San Jose.
Introduced by MC Steve Young, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Gates joked Young was all the things he was not - a great athlete, a college graduate "and he’s never been in trouble….whereas I’ve had a few speeding tickets."
He has obviously come a long way from his arrest in New Mexico for going through a stop sign in his Porsche.
On a serious note, he used his acceptance speech to urge the Valley’s top executives to consider philanthropy.
"All of us are very blessed, this gives us the opportunity of reducing inequity," he said.
Gates explained how he became involved in giving away much of his fortune when he was made aware that the science of preventing millions of deaths was not a problem, it was the lack of attention to it in affluent nations, where diseases such as malaria and Yellow Fever had disappeared.
" Ninety per cent of money spent on health research is spent on the healthiest…there’s $1bn a year  spent on baldness," he pointed out.
The Tech Museum Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity, sponsored by Applied Materials, featured many projects in developing countries. Intel’s Environment Award  was won by a project that made recycling plastic easier. Other projects included fog curtains that can collect up to 750 litres of drinking water a day and a sea-water greenhouse that provides fresh water and grows plants in Oman.
A full list of award winners is here.

Chris Nuttall, San Jose

The inevitable success of Microsoft’s "fast-follower" strategy is often taken as a given. It may turn up in a new market late, its first attempts may be clunky and unimpressive, but it eventually gets the product right. But in some consumer technology markets (think Apple and Google), playing catch-up may not be an option.

Bill Gates offered a subtle but interesting gloss on Microsoft’s strategy today. At Stanford University for a taping of the Charlie Rose TV show, he almost bragged about how Microsoft burned through a fortune in failed cable investments in the late 1990s in its effort to break into the set-top box business (rough cost: $10bn.) Others in the company were all for pulling back. Not Gates. Getting into the internet-delivered TV business ten years too soon was fine, he said, because when markets like these finally take off, the company that was first, and that has already surrounded itself with the most pieces of the technology puzzle, is the one that catches the wave.

He summed it up in a sound-bite that should be pinned over every cubicle in Redmond: "If you’re early, that’s OK."

Richard Waters, San Francisco

The Ultra Mobile PC that was launched to a lukewarm reception by Microsoft, Intel and Samsung six months ago is back with Version 2.0 of this new category.

Rather embarrassingly for Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker and champion of power-efficient processors is now missing from the triumvirate.

Samsung has replaced its original Q1, which was criticised for its poor battery performance and high price, with the Q1b. It has also subsituted Intel’s original processor with one from its much smaller x86 rival VIA.

VIA is currently proudly showing the Q1b around town. It points out its processor has enabled battery life to be doubled from two hours to four hours, despite a 30 per cent increase in screen brightness, and the Q1b’s price has been dropped $200 to a more affordable $900.

Intel has more than 1,000 engineers working on the UMPC concept so to drop the ball and allow tiny VIA to step in shows they are going to have to work a lot harder.

While there are other manufacturers of UMPCs, Samsung’s Q1 has been the flagship product of the category.

Intel is expected to announce more partners at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but VIA says it will have several announcments as well.

With AMD not featuring in this segment yet, the Intel goliath has another "David" to deal with in UMPCs.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco

First cars, now airplanes. Apple is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to cement the iPod’s dominance of the personal music player market. This morning, the company announced a deal to let passengers of six big airlines play music and video from their iPods over the airlines’ in-flight entertainment systems. Air France, KLM, Emirates, Continental, United and Delta Air Lines will install special iPod connectors that allow passengers to charge their iPods in flight.

The move to lock in captive audiences - and presumably lock out competitors, such as the Microsoft Zune - is nothing new; Apple has already struck similar deals with carmakers.

What is remarkable is that the cash-starved airlines are willing to play along with a new feature that will divert users from existing in-flight entertainment. A United spokeswoman just told me that the iPod deal does not include cash. She said the iPod deal was part of a broader effort to upgrade entertainment options available to international first class and business travelers.

It seems the iPod has become such an important part of the digital culture that airlines believe the very promise of being able to listen to Radiohead or watch Desperate Housewives on their iPods on a transatlantic flight will be enough to draw hordes of high-paying customers.

So promises Nick Denton, who has just returned to journalism and given a make-over to Valleywag, the blog that set out to expose the private lives of the Technocracy. Seems that if you cut through the Web 2.0 froth Silicon Valley is still all work and no play after all. (Full disclosure: Nick was an FT hack before creating the Gawker Media blog empire.)

Richard Waters, San Francisco

The blogosphere is still growing rapidly, but blogs are being squeezed out of the ranks of the top online media sites. That is the lesson that Nick Carr has drawn from his analysis of the latest State of the Blogosphere report by Technorati’s David Sifry (see our brief note on SOTB here). The numbers are striking:

Just two years ago, in October 2004, blogs accounted for 16 of Technorati’s 35 most influential and authoritative media sites. They represented, in other words, 45% of the short head, with mainstream media (MSM) sites holding the remaining 55%. By March 2005, the number of blogs in the top 35 had dropped to 13, or 37%. By August 2005, it was down to 11, or 31%. By February of 2006, blogs held only 4 of the top 35 slots – or 11%. Finally, in [Technorati’s] new October 2006 report, just 2 blogs - Engadget and Boing Boing - were in the top 35. Blogs’ share of the short head has fallen to a piddling 6%.

Nick thinks the shift has to do with mainstream media sites becoming more tech-savvy. As big media succeeds in its transition from print to digital, he says, more and more blogs are transforming into niche sites - the 21st century equivalent of trade journals and newsletters.

The idea of there being an A List of bloggers, then, is something of a misnomer now. The real A List of online media is made up almost entirely of the sites maintained by mainstream media companies. Bloggers seem fated to be, at best, B Listers.

According to Nick’s numbers, the big shift came between August 2005 and February 2006, when blogs’ share of the top 35 sites dropped from 11 to 4. Any thoughts about what happened during those six months to cause the trend to hit its tipping point?

Like the United States, Second Life is beginning to suffer the strains of being a popular destination for those seeking a new world to explore.

The metaverse created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab has become a victim of overcrowding and its systems are being overwhelmed by a wave of fresh immigrants.

Second Life passed its millionth-registration milestone over the past month and more than 200,000 accounts have been created in the past fortnight alone.

Many of these are people joining from overseas with more than  50 per cent increases in people arriving from Turkey, India, Portugal, Israel, China, Singapore, Columbia, Hungary, Romania, Malaysia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Peru, Chile, Croatia, and Taiwan, according to the Second Life November newsletter.

As a consequence, the Orientation Islands, where new members get their bearings, are now full and volunteers from the Mentor and Live Help groups are struggling to keep up with the influx.

But Linden Lab again echoes the US’s stance in the real world in insisting its values won’t change.

"We continue to believe in free expression, tolerance, creativity and community as the foundation for building the world," it says.

More prosaically, it promises it is committed to revamping customer support services and rationalising and improving communication systems.

That also carries a real-world price: Second Life’s virtual town hall meeting on Thursday was dominated by a debate on Linden pushing up its charges next week for acquiring private islands in order to meet its cost of hosting the worlds and properties being created by its ever-growing population.

Set-up fees will rise from $1250 to $1675 and monthly rent from $195 to $295.

Chris Nuttall, San Francisco