The Public Library of Science has responded to various new networks cropping up in the wake of the Scienceblogs Pepsigate scandal by recruiting keen writers and putting their brand behind them.

Advantage for those wounded by the Scienceblogs ethical quicksand - they can carry no ads because they have PLoS One (and it's projected whopping 7,000 pay-to-publish articles this year) to carry the revenue load for blogging and the rest of PLoS.  Plus blogging is not terribly server heavy so the cost will not be onerous.  It's just writing and people comment.  Pretty simple in both programming and caching.

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about how I like Skype, and I noted some legal problems between the Skype founders and eBay, which bought Skype in 2005.

Shortly after I wrote that, eBay completed the sale of the majority share of Skype to a private investment group (eBay kept 30%), and shortly after that, the investment group settled with the Skype founders: the founders got a 14% share and two board seats, and they dropped their lawsuits.  With those problems sorted out, Skype continued to do well.