Vuze, the online video service that uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute its content, has come up with hard data suggesting “bandwidth throttling” is more widespread than previously thought.

Some internet service providers (ISPs) have not taken kindly to surges in P2P traffic on their network, with the file exchanges consuming large amounts of bandwidth. Although consumers can argue they have paid for unlimited bandwidth with their monthly subscriptions, companies such as Comcast have used techniques that disrupt P2P traffic and have become the subject of complaints to the Federal Communications Commission in the US.

Vuze made available a software plug-in to users in January that looks for “reset packets”, used to interrupt a network connection, and sends such information back to Vuze for collation.

Today it released its initial findings based on results from 8,000 users around the world.

Comcast tops the table, with one of its networks interrupting 24 per cent of connections. Ten other Comcast networks figure in the top 20. Canada’s Cogeco is fourth with a 19 per cent interruption rate and others with high rates include  Emirates Internet, Cablevision,  BellSouth, AOL and Tiscali UK.

For almost-interruption-free file downloads, the best bet seems to be Telecom Italia France with a 2.5 per cent rate.

Vuze’s conclusion: “We believe that there is sufficient data to suggest that network management practices that ‘throttle’ internet traffic are widespread.”

The company has written to Cablevision, Cogeco, BellSouth (now owned by AT&T) and AOL asking them to “clarify their broadband management practices in the interest of transparency for consumers.”

Has Red Hat scrapped its plans to take on Microsoft with a Linux desktop machine for the emerging world?

Unfortunately it’s not easy to answer that question. A Reuters report from India suggests the answer is yes. But my own questions to the company over the past 24 hours have brought nothing in the way of enlightenment, and Red Hat has now instead churned out this verbose and obtuse posting on its company “blog” (if companies keep using their blogs for this kind of corporate-speak we’ll even look back on good old press releases with nostalgia.)

To save you the pain of reading the whole thing, these are the key sentences:

We originally hoped to deliver RHGD [the “global desktop” product] within a few months, and indeed the technology side of the product is complete. There have, however, been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year. These include hardware and market changes, startup delays with resellers, getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down and, unsurprisingly, some multimedia codec licensing knotholes.

“Hardware and market changes”? That’s pretty broad. The only thing to emerge from all of this is that we will probably have to wait at least another year to find out if Red Hat is still interested.

Along with positive earnings reports this week by IBM and Intel, the latest figures on PC shipments pubslihed on Wednesday by Gartner and IDC should offer some relief to technology investors who have been trying to assess the likely impact of a US slowdown on sales of IT equipment.

Both groups found that the US slowdown had begun to hit PC shipments in the US. But they also found that slower US growth was more than made up for by a stronger-than-expected preformance overseas.

Still, investors would be wise not to breathe a sigh of relief just yet. For one thing, it’s likely that PC makers were forced to cut prices significantly to counter sagging demand in the US - a move that is likely to eat away at the industry’s already thin margins. We’ll know more about that next month, when the big PC companies report their latest results.

In the meantime, investors trying to sort out their investment strategies will have plenty to chew over, particuarly when it comes to Dell and Hewlett-Packard, the world’s biggest PC makers.

Gartner’s latest figures showed that HP’s US shipments shrank in the first quarter. The decline was a slight one, but potentially worrying given a strong improvement by Dell, which is a year into its own turnaround.

Unfortunately for investors, it’s unlikely that the PC industry’s muddled picture will clear up anytime soon.

Another Semantic Web company looking for cash: William Tunstall-Pedoe of True Knowledge says he needs $10m in venture capital to back the next stage of his Cambridge (UK)-based company, which is trying to build a sort of “universal database” on the Web.

Tunstall-Pedoe’s plan is to collect information in a structured way in an online knowledge base, making it much like MetaWeb’s Freebase (which has raised $42m.) Users could then query that using natural language questions, and an open API would make the information machine-readable.

Like Nova Spivack of Radar Networks ($20m in venture capital), Tunstall-Pedoe is a computer scientist who has been at this a long time. While on a visit to Silicon Valley this week, he told me that he has worked on the technology for ten years. Also like Spivack, Barney Pell at Powerset ($12.5m) and others in the field, he says that while it will take years more for the technology to reach its full potential, a usable consumer version could come relatively soon (in True Knowledge’s case, about a year.)

The danger for all these companies is that they stretch themselves to build a consumer service too soon, wasting cash and disappointing users in the process. The technologies of the Semantic Web may well eventually yield the next breakthroughs for organising and finding information online, but the early pioneers should be wary of getting swept up in the venture capitalists’ latest rush to find the Next Big Thing (Our own fuller analysis of the movement is here.)

Virtual online worlds may seem more fashionable these days, but The Sims, an eight-year-old computer game that simulates life, has just sold its 100 millionth copy.

The Sims was only expected to ship in the hundreds of thousands when it was launched in 2000, but it has become the best-selling PC game of all time for its publisher Electronic Arts.

The Sims, The Sims 2 and numerous expansion and “stuff” packs have built up the numbers, as well as releases on other platforms such as mobile devices and consoles.

There still seems plenty of life left in the franchise. The Sims 3 is due next year as is The Sims The Movie. There is a casual games site, The Sims Carnival, about to be launched and a karaoke site, The Sims On Stage.

EA has made The Sims one of four divisions or “labels” in the company to help it grow globally. It is already available in 22 languages and 60 countries. Nancy Smith, president of the division, says the game has appealed to a wide demographic and 50 per cent of players are female.

While there is a thriving online community sharing content, she says The Sims is different from virtual worlds.

“On the PC, it’s really a single-player experience. Players create these stories and raise these generations of families. When they want to share, they come to the community, like an artist putting on an exhibition.”

For a viewing, check out the thousands of videos on YouTube. A Sims version of the pop star Lily Allen, for example, features in an in-world music video for her hit Smile. Even though it is sung in hard-to-fathom Simlish - The Sims own language - it has been viewed 4m times.

For the record, The Sims lies in overall third in franchise sales, behind Nintendo’s plumber Mario, on 200m and counting, and its Pokemon, with 165m in sales.

The clicking habits of Google’s US users continue to cause concern.

For the third month in a row, the number of “paid clicks” (or impressions on adverts) in the US was little changed in March from a year ago. That is according to data from comScore that started to seep out late on Tuesday (the information is given first to analysts before being made public officially later.)

Overall, for the first quarter, Google’s paid clicks rose only 2 per cent, despite a big jump in the number of searches in the same period.

How much of this is due to Google improving the quality of its market by weeding out low-value or unintentional clicks (which could lead to an off-setting jump in revenue per click,) and how much does it reflect a cyclical downturn? John Aiken at Majestic Research says he things it’s 75 per cent cyclical (and at least one Google executive has hinted that economic weakness is an issue.) If so, that could hit the entire internet sector. The results will be out on Thursday.

That is the new mantra for a band of internet operators which until now has lived in a twilight world where the value of domain names can rise and fall as fast as a dotcom stock price, and where mastering the latest tricks for syphoning traffic from Google can make the difference between fortune and bankruptcy.

Communicate.com (now renamed Live Current Media) is a case in point. The various businesses this company has been through, as described to me by new boss Geoff Hampson, read like an opportunists’ history of the internet:

Domain name trading. Communicate.com was one of those to see the value of registering popular domain names, and later made money selling off names like Rugby.com and Beijing.com.

Search engine arbitrage. This involved acquiring traffic by advertising on search engines, then trying to turn a profit by filling its sites with ads from Yahoo that would draw a higher price per click. Many of the companies that tried that tactic have been put out of business: the search engines cracked down on the practice and started to block “landing pages” that contain only adverts, rather than the real content users are looking for (this story in the Financial Post about how Canadian company Geosign blew $160m on the strategy is instructive.)

Ecommerce partnership. The next step was to lease some of its well-known “geo” names (which include Brazil.com) to Frequent Traveller, which would turn them into ecommerce travel sites. That failed, says Hampson: “They were trying to do customised travel deals at discount prices.”

Building a bona fide “media” company. Hampson, who took control last year, now says he’s out to create a real media business around the most popular domain names, like Cricket.com.

It’s no surprise that other, bigger domain name companies - like Demand Media, Marchex and Internet REIT - all say they are heading in the same direction. Unless they can fill their sites with more useful content, they risk losing traffic from the search engines (notwithstanding the dark arts of search engine optimisation, which they all use to stay as high in the “natural” search rankings as possible.)

Don’t expect too much from these new “media” sites, though. Not surprisingly, there is much talk of trying to harness user generated content and social networking, spiced up with a sprinkling of “expert” commentary. How many compelling sites will come from this ultra-low cost approach to domain name development?

Humour and ingenious gameplay are giving small independent game developers a fighting chance against the big-budget efforts of the major video game publishers.

At least that was the impression left by Nintendo’s Wiiware demonstration for the gaming press in San Francisco today.

Wiiware is a new downloadable game service for the Wii, similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade service. It was launched last month in Japan and arrives in the US on May 12. There is no date yet for Europe.

Gamers can buy the games with Wii points and small developers benefit from not having the prohibitive costs of packaging, marketing and distribution to retail stores.

Nintendo said today that start-ups like San Francisco’s 2D Boy were the quintessential indie developers that Wiiware was designed for.

Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel left Electronic Arts to start the company and still work out of local coffee shops.

They have come up with a physics puzzle/construction game called World of Goo, where Goo balls can be linked together to create towers and bridges and complete tasks.

The Goo balls have zippy, optimistic, endlessly striving personalities and are unaware of the unhappy destination they are heading for at the World of Goo Corporation.

“The game is a metaphor for the horrible interactions we have had with publishers so far,” Kyle told us.

A second presentation was made by Telltale Games, a four-year-old company started by two LucasArts veterans in its old base of San Rafael in the Bay Area.

Its Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People is the first episodic content for Wiiware. The game is based on the very funny Strong Bad character and others created by online animators Matt and Mike Chapman at Homestarrunner.com.

Five monthly episodes will be released containing dialogue-based puzzles and lots of retro mini-games such as Snake Boxer 5, where a low-polygon-count boxer punches a snake.

Wiiware seems to encourage a level playing field for developers. Looking around the demo room later, the indie games’ simple graphics matched up well with some surprisingly rudimentary ones from bigger publishers, in particular, Boom Blox, the first game to come out of Electronic Arts’ collaboration with the movie director Steven Spielberg.

It’s all “in the game” play, to paraphrase EA’s catchphrase.

Vertical search, social search and now… identity search?

The attempts to outflank Google continue. This time it’s Barry Diller’s IAC, which has already failed to make much of a dent in the three years it has owned Ask.com. Diller’s latest gamble: that a search engine aimed at a particular demographic has a better chance of success.

Hence Rushmore Drive, which launches today - a site which wants to become the Google of the US’s 50m-strong black population (African-American is too narrow a label, says Johnny Taylor, the IAC executive in charge.) Taylor says the plan is to deliver a full Web search, but tilted towards the particular interests and outlook of its target audience (the patented algorithm that does the tilting could be used to build search engines for other broad demographics, he adds.)

So is this a better way to attack the search market? Logic suggests that if you can create a differentiated product and brand and market it well, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to carve out a slice of a market, even against a dominant company like Google.

Distribution will be one challenge. Inertia is a powerful force. How many internet users take the trouble to reset the default search engines they are first presented with?

The acid test, though, will be whether Rushmore Drive (named after the search engine’s street address) really can build and brand a “better” product for its target audience. A former senior search executive I spoke to this week put it this way: “The basics of search aren’t such a big deal - but there are many, many tweaks.” This process of “tuning” a search engine is a difficult art. There is also the not inconsiderable challenge of delivering results in 0.3 seconds (that’s how long it took for Google to come back with results to the query for “Rushmore Drive”.)

But unlike Ask.com, which tried to compete with Google head-on, at least Rushmore Drive has a different story to tell.

Flickr is the Apple of online photo-sharing with its high multimedia standards, cool interface, tools and fanatical following, but a failure to add video has been a major shortcoming of the service.

No longer. The Yahoo subsidiary finally introduced video today, but with some limitations.

Only Pro members, who pay an annual $24.95 subscription, can upload to the new service and clips are being kept to 90 seconds and 150mb in size.

Flickr says the 90-second limit is an artistic rather than a technical one.

It told its community:

“You know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.”

So Flickr appears to want to remain distinctive by discouraging the kind of music video and TV-clip uploads seen on YouTube. Videos should be an extension of photos, perhaps recorded on the same camera, considering that so many digital cameras now have a movie feature.

The new service is completely integrated and looks as cool as the photo one - it has already attracted its first meme, Fridgets.