Old clip of Caruso and Homer selection from Aida

One of the aspects of the internet which crept up on me slowly was the extent to which very specialised enthusiasms, which would have been slow and sometimes expensive to indulge, are now available via simple searches.  Here's a clip of Louise Homer and Enrico Caruso in a duet from Verdi's Aida.

Kevin Rose on Buzz

Given that Buzz is in the face of gmail users at the moment it doesn't exactly qualify as "Off the Beaten Path". It is, however, an important development in communications technology because of the ubiquitous nature of Google, and because of the dramatic way they launched it.

My first impulse is that it was nothing more than an attempt to do a frontal attack on Facebook. Kevin Rose made this video which puts forward another view, that Buzz is primarily about giving Google a more sophisticated data mining pool for customer information.