Reuters - When Clear Channel wanted to launch a format-free Internet radio station called erockster, executive VP/head of online music and radio Evan Harrison turned to his old friend Eric Szmanda for ideas. Best known for playing Greg Sanders on the hit series "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," Szmanda at first seems like an unlikely choice for leading such a major initiative at the world's largest radio broadcaster.

AP - Cable TV, phone and Internet service provider Charter Communications drew concern Friday from two congressmen and a privacy advocate over its plan to experiment with tracking its customers' Web use in collaboration with an online advertising firm.

AP - Yahoo Inc. is seeking to conceal large portions of a shareholder lawsuit alleging the Internet company's board improperly thwarted Microsoft Corp.'s $47.5 billion takeover offer, raising shareholder questions over the motives for the secrecy.

AP - Classified ad Web site Craigslist is denying online auctioneer eBay's allegation that it unfairly diluted eBay's stake in it and says its board was acting to protect the company.

PC World - This was a big IT news week, with the massive earthquake in China on Monday showing once again the role that the Internet...

TechWeb - InformationWeek - The government-mandated transition next February offers a chance to win new first-time or lapsed pay-TV subscribers.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - Lawmakers express privacy concerns over a June pilot program that reportedly tracks some subscribers' Internet visits.

TechWeb - Intelligent Enterprise - Netezza deployment replaces mega data warehouses while cutting query times from hours to seconds.

NewsFactor - Players of Disney video games on the Nintendo DS now have their own avatar-based online community. On Thursday, Disney announced that its DGamer community is now available, along with the Nintendo DS version of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

InfoWorld - ObjectWave is offering a rich Internet application platform called Swan, which makes it easier to link AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) interfaces to back-end server code.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - HP says the problem could occur because XP SP3 tries to place on computers a power management driver that's only supposed to run on PCs that use Intel chips.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - Apple has signed iPhone deals that show it is willing to deviate from its insistence on having only one service provider sell its cell phone in each country.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - Interviews with Sam Ramji and Tom Robertson reveal Microsoft is strong on building open source business models and community as well as interoperability and industry standards.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - Barracuda Networks learns the hard way about the importance of e-mail archiving.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - The DD690 device boosts the vendor's claimed data ingestion and deduplication rate to 170 Mbps for a single backup stream and to 388 Mbps aggregate for multiple streams

TechWeb - Intelligent Enterprise - The major storage manufacturers have struggled to put together viable strategies for data reduction.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - A developer from an Australian university shares his top five reasons a certain content management company will go out of business.

TechWeb - InformationWeek - Multichannel video subscribers should account for almost 89% of TV households in five years, according to a report from SNL Kagan.