And who better a guest to have at this launch than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the web's creator? He gave a short speech, then joined a panel discussion with top technology pundit Bill Thompson and Professor Susan Greenfield, the neuroscientist who has expressed some concerns about the impact of the web on children. And Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Free, joined us by satellite from San Francisco. The discussion was moderated by Aleks Krotoski - the presenter of the forthcoming television programmes. Here are a few scrambled, slightly chaotic notes from the event:

George Entwhistle, Controller BBC Knowledge, explained the process behind this open source programme.
"We'll share our rushes, blog as we go along and aim to build a web community around the programme. Who better to tell us about the web than the web itself?"

Sir Tim Berners Lee:

"I was coming through customs yesterday and when I said I'd invented the web, the customs officer said Why? My answer was that someone had to, and I was frustrated that it did not exist."
(You can hear some of what Sir Tim said here)
He explains the problem of sharing information at CERN, and how that drove him to come up with the web.

Twenty years on, he says, he's having to explain why we all need to put our data on the web. "Linked data is beginning to take off." He praises the BBC for sharing some of its data.

Government data - we must get it all out there so we can start making all sorts of connections.

Each time there is a paradigm shift, you have to look for the people who "get it" and cherish them.

Looking back over twenty years, it's the spirit of the web that matters.People doing it because they think it's a good idea. That spirit has made it very exciting, it's allowed everyone to get involved.People who didn't say no.

Looking ahead, the exciting things are semantic web and mobile. Only 20% of people have web access now. We have to make sure we target things in low bandwidth to people who may have poor connections.

Important to keep an open standards, royalty-free web.

Q+A.
What do you think of the fact that people post anonymously on the web?

Posting things anonymously is better than blowing up buildings. But as a user you have to learn to filter what you read online.

Q. What's the future of video on the web?

As a consumer, I feel that I should be able to get to - and pay for if necessary - anything that has ever been broadcast. I'm looking forward to a time when the BBC archive is online and I can get BBC content from the US. I'm prepared to pay. The common thread is random access.. The concept of a channel is going to be history very quickly.

Q. What is your view of policing the internet?

Things like fraud have moved online, and of course crime should be pursued on the internet just like everywhere else.
My feeling is that the web should be like a blank piece of paper. You can't buy paper on which you can only write the truth, or not draw a nude.
The medium should not be set up in order to constrain it.

Governements should not snoop on what people do on the internet. It will prevent people from using the net properly. "I don't want the governement to know my shirt-size."

Chris Anderson:

The internet lets you broadcast with an infinite number of channels. The web is "scale agnostic" - it works as well for reaching an individual as for reaching millions..

The 20th century was the century of physical production - an inflationary century.
The internet, and Moore's law, means everything gets cheaper. This allows you to be wasteful on the web - the economic cost is so low. It allows us to build businesses without knowing how they will make money. Companies with network television audiences, like Twitter, can be run with 50 people. We are economically and creatively liberated.

Susan Greenfield

My question is what will the web to do us? The brain will adapt to the different two dimensional environment that the web provides. We might be entering a world that is more sensory than cognitive.
When you read a book you are are led through linear steps. When you go on screen, it's a sensory process..
Wonders whether 3 year olds using Google is such a good idea - what have they learned to ask?
Are we changing round from an answer-poor, question rich environment to the opposite?

We need a debate about all of this. Could it be that if you're putting your brain in a situation where you're living for the moment, that could have consequences. Will it encourage greed and recklessness?

The banality of Twitter. "look at me, mummy, I've got my sock on...".If someone says they have 900 friends what does that say about friendship?

Why don't we have a few brain scans of young people to see what's changing? Can we find out what is so addictive about the web experience? Wouldn't it be great to sit down and think what we want to deliver to our kids? We mustn't blow this - the web can be a fantastic resource but we need to sit down and work out whether it's delivering a better society.

Bill Thompson

I saw the web first as a relative latecomer in 1993. The change that it has wrought - it's much bigger than television. What it's achieved in just twenty years is astounding. In fact it's more important even than print.

Think about the web in evolutionary terms - like developing a new eye. Delivering us access to more than a raw collection of facts but to knowledge. One of the most important things we have done as a species. So no wonder so many governments want to control it and see it as a threat.

It was built not to respect boundaries. So governments want to do everything they can to limit its potential. Tim told me in the mid-nineties he hoped the internet would help us to know more about our neighbours. "If we knew more, it would make us less likely to kill them." Sadly that hasn't happened - but the web does allow us to know about neighbours being killed.

But it's just starting - the evolution is at an early stage.

Tim Berners-Lee

People brought up on the web realise that when you give away information you don't lose - no longer a zero sum game. When I speak to government departments about giving away data, they worry that someone else will use that data and make money from it and that will be unfair. On the web the rules are different.

Bill Thompson and Susan Greenfield then have an interesting spat about privacy. Bill is keen to give it all away - and reads his mobile phone number out to the audience. Baroness Greenfield seems shocked.

Tim Berners-Lee explains how we can build structures of trust on the web. You take into account where data comes from, assess its reputation and the people behind it. "There are particular people I trust about movies, and particular people I trust about wine. Concepts of trust are quite subtle."

Baroness Greenfield says young people she meets are beginning to feel uncomfortable about being so transparent online.

Question - is access to the web a human right?

Sir Tim: Yes, like clean water. And of course clean water isn't available everywhere.

In particular, the Linux community - and I apologise for doubting in yesterday's post whether they are a community - seemed united in hostility to the idea that the Chrome OS was anything new.

Well, on the whole I'm glad that we ignored that, but it's worth reflecting on whether the whole story was as significant as it first seemed.

Google's new Linux-based operating system is only taking on Windows in one relatively small area, netbooks, and even there it's becoming clear that success is far from guaranteed.

I've been speaking to two firms planning to work with Google on the Chrome OS, one very cautious about its prospects, the other more enthusiastic.

The first, an executive from a netbook manufacturer who did not want to be named, said early hopes that customers for new small web-centred computers would embrace Linux had been dashed. "The market is now about 96% Windows," he told me. "Every manufacturer will admit that demand for Windows-based notebooks has far outstripped that for Linux."

He told me that customers wanted a familiar interface, and were worried about whether Linux would work with devices like mobile broadband USB dongles. "Linux just can't invest in that kind of compatibility," he told me. But he was encouraged by Google's ambitions: "If they can overcome those compatibility problems, bring in a user-friendly interface, then I think people will be interested."

Then I spoke to Ian Drew, vice-president for marketing at the British chip designer ARM whose processors are in many of the world's smartest mobile phones. He was much more excited about Chrome - which isn't surprising as ARM has been invited, along with Intel, to work on the operating system.

I asked him why customers would be any more inclined to desert Windows for Chrome than they had been to move to other flavours of Linux. He drew parallels with the smartphone world:

"If we'd had this conversation three years ago you'd have said nobody was going to beat Nokia Symbian - then Apple comes along with an innovative user interface and Google comes along with another. If things are designed that are easy to use and innovative and the right price, then there's room in the market."

He felt that familiarity with Google - and its reputation for usability - would give it a better chance than unknown Linux variants of winning customers. But he warned it wouldn't be easy, and that the new OS would have to be innovative:

"It can't just be seen as a replacement for Microsoft, it has to be seen to be x times different."

What struck me from both conversations is how rapidly the world is changing - the netbook market didn't exist a couple of years ago - yet how conservative consumers remain.

So Google's Chrome OS was big news in that it reflected the shift away from the desktop and into the cloud, but convincing people that they want to be part of that world is still going to be quite a challenge.

On the one side, there are commentators claiming that this is an earthquake in the software world - "Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft" read the headline on one technology blog.

On the other, the Linux community - if there is such a thing - was quick to dismiss the Chrome OS as a me-too product that might turn out to be vapourware.

When I asked for opinions on a well-known social network about the significance of Google's move, there was a sceptical response from some. One message read:

"I'd rather leave it to Linux. It's already there - and it's getting better all the time. This can only be a brain-drain".

Another said:

"So GOS is...a browser and a stripped down Linux Kernel? Like every other netbook? Lots of sound and fury, signifying nothing".

You won't be surprised to hear that my totally impartial BBC view of this announcement falls somewhere between the two extremes of nuclear explosion and vapourware.

First, it's clear that the Chrome OS is still at a very early stage of development, and Google is making this announcement partly to encourage the open-source community to get involved, and partly to land a punch on Microsoft as it prepares for the launch of Windows 7.

But it seems to me that this is another quite significant event in the gradual migration of millions of ordinary computer users - people who wouldn't know a Linux kernel from a hole in the head - out of the Windows world.

If, like me, your first experience of computing was through a desktop machine in the office - or a classroom computer - then you are very likely to be living in that world.

You will have learned to use products like Microsoft Office, you will probably have started sending e-mails using Outlook - or maybe Hotmail - and you will have taken your first faltering steps onto the world wide web using Internet Explorer.

Yes, a defiant and growing minority of users have preferred to live in Macworld, but Microsoft and Windows have been synonymous with computing for most people.

But just in the last couple of years the scenery has begun to change. Google is probably the brand most familiar to the new generation of computer users.

Now they're discovering that, as well as searching with Google, they can use its software to send e-mails, to write documents and spreadsheets using Google Apps, to take a journey down their neighbour's street with Street View, or to browse the web using Chrome.

Then there's the fact that a mobile phone is becoming the way millions of people now get much of their access to the internet and, in some cases, their first introduction to computing.

In the mobile world, Windows is just one of a number of operating systems - including Google's Android - jostling for users' attention.

And soon those people who are spending more of their time in the company of Google rather than Microsoft will have the opportunity to use the Chrome OS for all their computing needs. If, that is, they don't want to edit video or play online games or do any of the more complex tasks that this new operating system may struggle to handle.

And, yes, you can already live in a Linux world if you are really determined and quite sophisticated in your computer use - but that is always likely to be a minority pursuit.

So Microsoft won't exactly be running up the white flag at Redmond after reading the Google blog. But there may be some furrowed brows in the marketing team as they try to work out how many people will now choose to wait for Chrome rather than upgrade to the latest version of the Windows world.

That means it will be the only UK network selling what many regard as the two smartest phones on the market right now, the Pre and Apple's iPhone.

So congratulations to O2 - but just a little question. Is your network really good enough to cope with the flood of data?

Because the whole point of both phones is that users will be doing far more than just talking and texting - they will be online all of the time making the most of their unlimited data packages built into the pricey contracts you will be selling them.

iPhone users have already shown a far greater appetite for data than owners of just about any other phone - surfing the web more, uploading far more pictures to Flickr, and of course using all those online apps they've installed on their phones.

And the advent of the iPhone 3Gs has only accelerated that trend, with Google reporting that uploads to YouTube from a mobile soared by 400% in the days after the launch of the first video-capable iPhone.

But if my experience is anything to go by, users of either of these phones may hit heavy traffic on the web as they try to surf, download and share information and pictures online.

O2 tells me that users on its 3G data network experience speeds "up to 3.6Mbps" and says it has begun rollout of "up to 7.2Mbps". The company says it has good coverage across most of the UK, with built-up areas obviously doing better.

I've been testing those claims using a handy little application called Speed Test - which does what it says on the tin. Over the past month I've done a series of tests on an iPhone, all of them in the London area, where you'd expect to get a pretty good signal.

I did once get a download speed of 1.7Mbps, but in most cases the speeds were below 1Mbps, and quite frequently, the 3G network just didn't appear to be there at all.

The picture on the right shows a test conducted by the window of my office in West London - as you can see, the phone is apparently downloading at just 27Kbps and uploading at....well, 0.

If I'd wanted to send some video to YouTube, I would have had a long and fruitless wait - and the phone's battery would have given out long before I'd uploaded.

Mobile reception in or near buildings can be problematic, but on my morning walk with the dog near my home, I've noticed that the 3G network evaporates altogether when I get to the park.

I called 02, and the company confirmed that there was a small hole in the network in the place I described. The firm said it really needed to upgrade a nearby phone mast - but was wary of the reaction from residents who'd protested before about 3G masts.

I do feel some sympathy for phone networks, besieged on the one hand by geeks like me demanding better service - and on the other by campaigners fearful that phone masts could in some way pose a danger to health. And O2 is no different from the other networks in making somewhat fanciful claims about the speeds that can be achieved by mobile broadband customers.

But if mobile networks are going to become one of the key routes to the internet for million of users, they're going to need to build more six-lane highways to replace those B-roads where the traffic keeps getting stuck.

Update, 10:43, 8 July: This morning Ofcom has published a report on the state of 3G coverage in the UK, and the growing importance of mobile broadband to consumers.

It includes maps of each network's 3G coverage [668KB PDF]. And it has to be said that O2's coverage looks pretty thin compared to other networks, with 3 in particular looking as though it reaches far more places across the UK.

Now this revolution is gathering pace. As I've reported on this morning's Radio 4 Today programme, AudioBoo is attracting more and more content - celebrities like Stephen Fry are "booing", evangelists are using it for daily sermons, chefs and photographers are using it to broadcast daily tips, and citizen journalists have been sending audio reports from events like the G20 protests.

I particularly enjoyed this offering recorded by the Radio 4 newsreader Neil Sleat as he prepared for an afternoon bulletin. Having started as just an application for the iPhone, AudioBoo is now moving on to other phones, and has ambitious plans to expand further.

And there's now competition in the form of a rival service called ipadio. Unlike AudioBoo, you don't need wi-fi or even a 3G connection to use this way of sharing audio.

Ipadio's idea is to allow any phone user to broadcast live to the internet by simply making a call to the service. That means you only get phone quality audio - unlike the higher quality recordings you can make and upload using AudioBoo.

But Ipadio says it is "a live streaming phone reporting tool" whereas AudioBoo is a "record and publish" tool - and the company believes there is room for both.

Among those who've recorded "phlogs", as the company calls them are the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, the Paralympic champion Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, and a doctor recording an audio diary of his walk across the Pyrenees to raise money for a kidney charity.

The BBC's World Service has started an interesting project using some of these new audio tools. It's called Save Our Sounds, and the aim is to gather sounds from around the world which might otherwise be lost.

We're asking listeners to the Today programme to take part in this exercise, by recording audio from around Britain and uploading it to the Save Our Sounds site. If you could use the tag #r4today, that would help us to identify recordings made by listeners to the programme.

So, forget video - the future is sounds, not pictures - and you can be part of it. Or at least that's what my radio colleagues tell me.

That's certainly the suggestion in a couple of newspapers this morning. But is that really Tory policy, does the private sector want the job, and would it work?

What's under discussion is the NHS National Programme for IT - or more specifically the Care Records Service - which is being introduced in England.

Last year the National Audit Office warned that the whole project was over-budget and years behind schedule, with the total cost to the taxpayer running at £12.7bn and rising.

So are the Conservatives really going to call in Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault - systems in use in the United States - and get them to do the job for a lot less money?

Not yet, a press officer told me, but they are looking at a review they've commissioned from a panel of experts which has been considering what to do about the NHS IT project.

And a further hint that there was something to the story came this morning at an event called Reboot Britain, convened to discuss radical ways of using technology to rewire politics and the delivery of public services.

The shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt was the opening speaker, and while discussing the way the internet was shifting the balance of power between people and politicians, he did throw in that NHS IT figure of £12.7bn and ask whether there might be a better cheaper way of giving the public control over their medical records.

But Google did not seem eager to rush in and grab this great big contract. Its Google Health is a service which allows Americans to build online health profiles, to download their own records from doctors and pharmacies, and to search for medical information and treatment.

But Google stresses that this service works in a healthcare system that could hardly be more different from the one in the UK.

Microsoft has a rather different line on its HealthVault system which it describes as a "personal health application platform designed to put consumers in control of their health information."

The company says it's already in talks with the NHS about launching the system in England, though as an add-on rather than a replacement for the Care Records Service.

But would getting in either of these firms save any money? Because it's worth noting that private sector businesses - including Microsoft - are already heavily involved in the NHS National Programme for IT, but that hasn't stopped the project from becoming a costly disaster.

What is clear, however, is that politicians from all parties are waking up to two things - firstly, that huge centralised IT projects nearly always end in tears, and secondly that a web-savvy populace is demanding more access to its own data.

So a plan to allow us all to store our medical records, along with our photos and e-mails, somewhere in a Google or Microsoft cloud will need a lot of work before it becomes a reality.

But don't rule it out. After all, who would have predicted 10 years ago that we would one day see the head of MI6 in his Speedos on Facebook?

Ringtones are a multi-billion dollar industry and everyone from Madonna to Charlie Parker and from Wagner to Wang Chung is available for download.

Well now a court in New York is being asked to decide if ringtones can be classed as a public performance and if so the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, aka ASCAP, wants a piece of the action.

ASCAP has filed a suit in a Manhattan court against the country's two largest wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon. The organisation is a non-profit that collects fees for public performances of music. It then pays royalties to its 350,000 songwriting and publishing members.

Back in the 1990's ASCAP garnered unflattering headlines for suing the Girl Scouts over publicly performing camp songs like "Happy Birthday" and "Puff the Magic Dragon."

Now it is claiming that a ringtone that is played on a cellphone breaches copyright law.

In its brief ASCAP explains when a ringtone becomes a public performance:

"It need only be 'capable' of being performed to the public; whether the ringtone is set to play, and indeed whether anyone hears it, is of no moment."

The brief later states that:

"Whether the device is on or off, the volume is turned down, or the phone is placed on vibrate, AT&T has caused a public performance."

ASCAP has brought a similar action against Verizon but says it won't go after individuals in this fight.

Operators that sell ringtones already pay royalties to songwriters for use of their material.

So it's the music industry versus technology again over copyright.

Naturally enough there are a few groups who have asked the court to throw the whole thing out on its ear.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, says:

"[T]hese wrongheaded legal claims cast a shadow over innovators who are building gadgets that help consumers get the most from their copyright privileges."

Public Knowledge and the Centre for Democracy and Technology argue that copyright law exempts performances that are conducted without a commercial purpose.

ASCAP disagrees.

All three groups have said in their amicus brief to the court that they reject as "bogus copyright claims...that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardise consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation."

EFF's senior intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohman says:

"Are the millions of people who have bought ringtones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!"

Fines for copyright infringement are steep. Up to $150,000 (£92,600) per violation.

First, I was invited by BBC colleagues to speak at an internal "summit"on the use of Twitter in our operations. Then I saw our story about the marketing agency promising to buy Twitter followers for clients. Finally there was a press release from a PR agency boasting that its client's product had dominated conversation on the micro-blogging service for an entire day.

Now mine is just one of many organisations suddenly scratching their heads over the potential - and the pitfalls - of using Twitter, but the fact that we and others are holding seminars about it is a sign that this network is becoming less social, more corporate.

And what about this Australian "social media marketing agency" - scary enough in itself - which thinks it can make money by selling me and other Twitterers to anyone who wants to buy us?

As a long-term user, I'm both appalled and fascinated by the idea. I'm a few hundred users short of 10,000 followers and so would love to acquire a few more in my increasingly desperate attempt to overhaul a couple of the UK's top technology writers.

But rest assured, I won't be paying uSocial to spam you with entreaties to come and hear about my personal and professional life - though if you need to find me I'm at twitter.com/ruskin147.

And what value do the brands who do sign up for this service think they're getting - surely they are likely to antagonise more people than they attract?

But it was the e-mail from the PR firm which really got my goat. It boasted that its client, a software firm which I shall not name, had managed to become the top trend on Twitter by promising big prizes in a competition to people who tweeted its name.

This achievement has been lauded not just by the PR agency but by bloggers too as an example of the right way to engage in "social" marketing. But the result is that it has made Twitter a much less useful and enjoyable place to be for a day, with corporate messages intruding into the conversation. So forget "#iranelection" - or even "#andymurray" - from now on the trending topics are likely to be "#winbigatpoker" or "#loseweightnowaskmehow."

Of course, we need to be realistic - Twitter is a business, not a charity, and does need to make some money at some stage. But the irony is that none of the marketing agencies, global brands or media giants clambering onto the back of this fast-growing network appears to be handing over a penny to Twitter.

Instead, @ev and @biz, Twitter's founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone, seem to be looking on while others launch a marketing blitz which could do serious damage to their relationship with their users

I hadn't - so when a friend invited me to hear him speak at the Royal College of Art's Innovation Night I leaped at the chance.

Now one of the reasons you don't hear much from the Apple designer is that he is, by his own admission, a hesitant and unpolished speaker. He told the audience at the Royal College that he's learned that preparing presentations takes him away from perfecting a product, so he'd rather let others do the talking.

But the format last night was a fireside chat between Ive and the Rector of the Royal College Sir Christopher Frayling in front of an audience of students and what seemed like the whole of the London design community.

Amongst his own people, the designer seemed more comfortable than faced with intrusive probing from some impertinent hack - though I did manage to get one question in about what he'd have liked to change about the first version of the iPhone(no clear answer, I'm afraid, though he said designers were never satisfied with their work).

And what emerged were some fascinating insights into the culture of Apple and the craft of industrial design. Ive was insistent that the key to Apple's success was that it was not driven by money - a claim that may raise eyebrows amongst shareholders and customers - but by a complete focus on delivering just a few desirable and useful products.

"For a large mulit-billion dollar company we don't actually make many different products," he explained. "We're so focused, we're very clear about our goals."

He said that Steve Jobs had always made it very clear that this focus on products was the only reason for Apple to exist - and contrasted the culture with that of other companies who talk about having similar aims: "If you have to spend time institutionalising that, talking about it, you end up chasing your tail."

So how did the company decide what customers wanted - surely by using focus groups? "We don't do focus groups," he said firmly, explaining that they resulted in bland products designed not to offend anyone.

Christopher Frayling reminded us at that point of Henry Ford's line about what his customers would have demanded if asked - "a faster horse" - and it's surely true that the point of innovative companies is to come up with products that customers don't yet know they need.

But it was the physicality of design work that Jonathan Ive was keen to stress - from the Apple design workshop full of machines, throwing off a lot of noise and dust, to visits to Japanese aluminium craftsmen to learn how that material could be crafted into a laptop casing. Yes, of course he and his team use all the latest computer-aided design tools - but he also likes to knock out a physical prototype and feel the weight of it in his hand.

He told a story about how, as a boy, he'd taken apart an old-fashioned alarm clock, and inside the spare outer casing found a mass of workings, "an entire watch factory".

Extraordinary complexity wrapped in a simple, functional, touchable, beautiful case - that seems to be the Apple design ethic.

So an inspiring 45 minutes in the company of a design genius - a few fragments of which I filmed using one of Mr Ive's own products. But at the end, Apple's PR team came up to stress that this was a private event and would I please keep the pictures to myself.

Another example of the somewhat paranoid culture of a company which always wants to be in complete control of its message. But maybe that's another reason for its success...

Just a year or so back, it was MySpace which seemed far more mature - it had a lucrative advertising deal with Google, a wise old parent in Rupert Murdoch, and employed dozens of consultants around the world to deal with the concerns of regulators and politicians.

But now MySpace is fading fast, shedding hundreds of jobs, closing offices around the world, and saying goodbye to its founders Chris De Wolfe, who has left, and Tom Anderson, who is reportedly being paid to stay at home, while still being the automatic "friend" of all new joiners.

By contrast, in London this week I came across evidence that Facebook is growing up very rapidly, meeting two new executives who appear to symobolise the company's new-found respectability and confidence.

I was in the company's compact Soho Square premises - they're moving round the corner to a bigger place in Carnaby Street next week - to interview the chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

What exactly is a COO? I'm never sure - but at Facebook it seems to mean the person who runs the business while Mark Zuckerberg concentrates on the cool stuff. Sheryl Sandberg has one of those very scary CVs - a Harvard MBA, then a spell working as chief of staff to Bill Clinton's treasury secretary Larry Summers, then a top job at Google before heading to Facebook.

And her message to me was not about some new way of sending friends virtual sheep or making your profile look really cool, but something far more surprising - Facebook is actually making money. Or at least is on course to be "cash-flow positive in 2010."

Now a decade ago when every dotcom measured its worth in "eyeballs" on its site, and claimed it was on course to break even pretty soon, I'd have been quite sceptical about Ms Sandberg's forecast. But back then the whole point was to race as fast as you could towards an IPO( a stock market float) or a takeover by a bigger business so that you could cash the huge cheque from gullible investors and go on making losses for years.

Facebook, by contrast, appears determined to stay independent, despite selling small stakes at astronomic valuations to both Microsoft and a Russian media firm, and rumours of an impending IPO sparked by the appointment this week of a new chief financial officer.

Yet it is obviously spending pretty freely - the cost of servicing 200 million users around the world who all want to upload photos and generally keep the servers humming is growing by the day.

I put it to Sheryl Sandberg that each new user, especially those in less lucrative advertising markets like India, must be costing the company money - but she insisted that wasn't the case:

"Not only are we covering our current costs but we are making major investments in our growth all over the world and our revenue from advertising is covering those costs."

I've been sceptical about the ability of any social network to make serious money from advertising - who wants soap powder messages in the middle of a conversation with friends - but Facebook says its revenue is up 70% year-on-year in the middle of the worst recession many in the advertising business can remember.

True, a 70% rise compared to a period when the company made small change from ads may not tell the full story - but Facebook appears confident that it's cracked a way for advertisers to be part of the conversation rather than an intrusive annoyance.

And the other person I met at Facebook's London office symbolised the firm's determination to deal with its other challenge - regulation.

Richard Allan, a former Liberal Democrat MP and then director of European government affairs at Cisco, has been hired to lobby European regulators for Facebook.

With the EU mulling over tighter privacy rules for firms that share their users' data, and with continuing concern from politicians about issues like cyber-bullying and hate-speak on social networks, there will be plenty on Mr Allan's plate.

So, yes, Facebook suddenly looks like a mature business, poised for steady progress towards profitability and ready to engage in grown-up conversations about its place in society. Then again, so did MySpace a year ago, until it suddenly went out of fashion.

So Facebook now has to work out how to be both grown-up and cool at the same time - never an easy trick to pull off, as my children sometimes remind me.

They figure that at such a time, people have their guard down in their eagerness to substantiate rumours and half-truths. That has meant, for the legion of internet swindlers, this has been the ideal moment to trot out spam e-mails and throw up malicious websites to infect victims' computers.

As news of Michael Jackson's death was coming through, the scams started appearing almost instantaneously. As the days have passed, the guys behind these nefarious operations have stepped up their game.

Mr Jackson's death "took a lot of people by surprise - the spammers too," Dermott Harnett of anti-spam engineering at Symantec Corp told the Associated Press.

"It might take them some time to really pounce on this issue. They are catching up pretty quickly, though."

Spam is the most common way for fraudsters to find victims after these types of events. The easiest way to lure people into the trap is to trick users to click on e-mail attachments so that the online crooks can infect computers and take command of them for more underhand activities.

Symantec says the spam about Mr Jackson gets more convincing every day. One message promises a YouTube video showing the exclusive "last work of Michael Jackson." Unfortunately all users get is a malicious programme that steals their passwords.

Another example is that of a promise to show the "latest unpublished photos" of the so-called Prince of Pop if people click on a link which actually installs a password-stealing programme on users' machines.

Dodgy solicitations are even coming in the guise of legitimate news organisations that seem like the real deal because they contain accurate enough information to persuade people to click on the link. Others promise access to secret songs.

In an e-mail I received from Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker Network, they warned about spam e-mails offering recipients links to unpublished videos and pictures of the late pop star. All of course fabulously enticing to see in this frenzied atmosphere.

In some cases the spam may force a pop-up message asking users to update their copy of Adobe's Flash. This is seen as a standard hacker tactic notes ComputerWorld.com as a way to install spyware.

One of the newer scams that Sophos has noticed is a malware-free scam that tries to get people to send money to the bogus "Michael Jackson Organisation."

Symantec has drawn up a list of scams that will soon become commonplace as a result of Mr Jackson's surprise death and that of Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.

These include things like spam with subject lines trying to peddle fake medicines, Twitter tweets about these deaths with links to all sorts of malicious websites and sites claiming to host videos of the last moments of these individuals lives. The purpose is to actually peddle fake goods or malware or even collect and validate live e-mail addresses to sell to the highest bidder for spamming.

The age old advice is to only visit sites you are familiar with and trust... yes, that would be the BBC. Added to that, the security community also recommends users do not click on every link that pops up related to the story, don't open e-mails from people you don't know and of course keep security solutions up to date.

In a blog, Sophos reckons naturally enough things will get worse before they get better.

"It is likely that more Michael Jackson-themed malware and spam is on its way however. It is advised that users be especially vigilant when they receive messages or links related to this news."

Such are the times we live in!

Their latest venture is called Video Bay, and after a period of reasonably private testing, they're now giving the wider world a glimpse of its workings.

And what they appear to be planning is a rival to YouTube, and one which will cause even more outrage to the film and music industries than did the original file-sharing site.

You can't get much of an idea about the plans for Video Bay yet - a message on the home page says:

"This site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunk (en)coding, so please don't bug us too much if the site ain't working properly."

But you can see that some video has already been uploaded, and much of it seems to be the kind of copyright material - music videos, TV episodes - which would instantly attract a warning notice and probably instant deletion if uploaded to YouTube.

Still, wasn't that exactly what YouTube looked like in its early days, before the takeover by Google and the multi-billion dollar lawsuits from media firms unhappy about the use of their content?

I put that point to a spokesman for Google, who insisted that the comparison did not hold water. He said that, right from the start, YouTube was run in accordance with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the EU's e-commerce directive. So that meant that if content owners spotted their material on the site, they could contact YouTube and get it taken down sharpish.

But once Google took over, that was not enough to satisfy Viacom, which felt that a giant corporation ought to be able to police the site and deal with abuse of copyright.

And that forced Google to introduce what it calls its "Content ID" system, which automates the process of spotting copyright content the moment it is uploaded.

Media firms then have a choice - they can either have it deleted (like my classy video of Brentford v Exeter City), or choose to "monetise" it (as Cat Stevens record label did when I inadvertently used his music as a backing track).

Google says that media firms are mostly choosing the latter option: "they've gone from wanting to block it to seeing YouTube as a platform where they can make money," as the spokesman put it.

We can only speculate what Video Bay will look like when - and if - it is finally launched, but it seems possible that, unlike YouTube, it will allow users to upload more than 10 minutes of material at a time. That will allow the provision of episodes of TV series, or extended highlights of sports events - just the kind of material that content owners are most keen to protect.

But content owners claim they are now looking to work with new platforms rather than instantly reach for their lawyers - so will their attitude to Video Bay be more lenient than it was to YouTube in the early days?

Unlikely - unless the Pirate Bay folks are suddenly going to come over all law-abiding, agree to take down any copyright material, and police their site for anything that may contravene the rules.

Or perhaps the world's media industries will decide that Video Bay can be an exciting new advertising platform and work with the Swedes to develop it.

Anyone betting on either of those outcomes?

There's a lot of hype around - and precious little hard information - but it's a fair bet that the global nature of his fame, and the sudden nature of his untimely death will have produced huge traffic around the world wide web to certain sites.

As Maggie Shiels reported earlier, the traffic was on such a scale that even Google News struggled to cope, and a number of sites - notably, TMZ which broke the story - were unavailable at times.

There are some statistics around - Hitwise tells me that Twitter had its biggest day ever yesterday, and it's virtually certain that the record will be broken again today. Websites like this one are seeing traffic far above normal levels, and our article on Michael Jackson's death could well end up as the most-read story in the history of the BBC News website by the end of the day.

But did the internet actually buckle? Well, there was some strain - but it seems to have come through well.

In the United States, a company called Keynote, which monitors internet performance, says popular news sites showed marked slowdowns for three hours from about 2230 BST: "The average speed for downloading news items doubled from less than four seconds to almost nine seconds," said Shawn White from Keynote. "During the same period, the average availability of sites dropped from almost 100% to 86%."

But guess what: in Europe overnight, there was no spike in internet traffic. Interoute, which operates Europe's largest fibre optic voice and data network, sent me graphs (see below) showing traffic through the three key internet exchanges in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London. At all three exchanges, traffic was either around the same as normal overnight, or, in London's case, actually a little lower.

So what's going on? Well for one thing, the kind of people who were online late at night may well have decided to leave their computers and turn on the television for the breaking news. Then there's the fact that much of the increasing traffic across the internet in recent years has been in the form of web video, whereas news of Michael Jackson's death was spread through less bandwidth-heavy social networking and news sites.

Jonathan Brown of Interoute told me: "The 140 characters in a Twitter message doesn't really take up a lot of internet traffic. When you have something like Barack Obama's inauguration - a continuous streaming video coming from one destination which everyone is going to - then you really see a big spike in traffic."

So individual sites may have struggled for a while to cope with a big surge in traffic. But an internet which is gradually adapting to handle vast amounts of video did not come close to buckling.

I've had three wonderful years running the technology section, interviewed some of the biggest names in the business and covered some of the best stories.

I leave dot.life in the capable hands of Rory Cellan-Jones and Maggie Shiels. And in the crack online tech team, they'll continue to write the day-to-day journalism because they recognise how important the subject area is.

As author Carl Sagan once said:

"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."

For those who want to stay in touch, you can find me on Twitter.

Luckily, during that telephone call with John Curran, Windows business lead, Microsoft UK, a story did emerge. And it's this - European consumers will be offered a browser-free Windows at a decent price to satisfy those fussy folks at the European Commission. The trouble is, that's unlikely to please either Brussels or consumers.

Microsoft is in the middle of another epic battle during its long war with the European Commission over the alleged abuse of its monopoly position. This time the issue is the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, the subject of complaints from rival browser makers.

Earlier this month Microsoft came up with a ploy it thought might satisfy the Commission, promising that Windows 7 would be released in Europe without any browser.

Today we learned that this would mean that European users who wanted to upgrade would have to install the full version - if they'd been offered the simpler upgrade, that would have simply imported their existing browser, almost certainly Internet Explorer, into their new setup.

But Microsoft says it's giving European users that full version for the same price that it would normally charge for an upgrade - £79.99 in the UK.

But here's the problem. You upgrade from XP or Vista to Windows 7, and then find you've got no browser. No problem, I hear you say, you just go and download one - say Firefox, or Chrome, or Safari or maybe Internet Explorer 8. Using your browser. Ahh...right.

Microsoft told me "we will have some answers" to this issue, but admitted there were "challenges and complexities" involved. But the company pointed out to me that the vast majority of Windows 7 users were likely to be people buying new computers, and the manufacturers were likely to pre-install a browser on those machines.

So what will the likes of Dell, Toshiba, HP or Lenovo choose to install? Internet Explorer 8, perhaps?

John Curran from Microsoft said the whole aim of the European version of Windows 7 was to make sure that the company was "in full compliance with EU law." I rang a man in Brussels to ask whether the European Commission was impressed by Microsoft's behaviour.

The sound of loud harrumphing came whistling down the line. "For them to claim they're doing this in order to comply with European law is just nonsense," he told me, although he used a slightly stronger term than nonsense.

He explained that Brussels had suggested an alternative approach, whereby consumers were offered a "ballot screen" when they first turned on a Windows 7 computer, allowing them to choose from a menu of different browsers.

And he pointed out that if the whole business ends up with Microsoft somehow persuading manufacturers to install Internet Explorer on their machines, then consumers will be no better off.

Microsoft believes it's offering European consumers a compelling product while satisfying the concerns of the regulators. But the next move will come from Brussels - and it looks likely that Microsoft will be ordered to offer not a browser-free Windows 7 but one with a full menu of choices.