This past week has been one of those where-did-the-time-go? weeks. A mixture of work of the type that requires close attention and intense focus along with a business trip to the south of France for two days resulted in a complete absence of new content on this blog for the whole week until today, other than one FIR cross-post.

My to-blog list is huge. Reality check: on the one hand, time has marched on making many of the topics really too late for depth commenting; and on the other hand, I don’t have time to do any of those topics justice.

But rather than let the whole list just slip by the wayside, let me share a selection of the topics that caught my attention or appeared in key word lists in my RSS reader. You can also find all of these stories in my link blog.

As usual, lots going on in the big connected world.

Europe Is Holding Off On Net [Neutrality] (For Now). At a conference in Brussels, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes indicated there’s not much interest in new regulation over net neutrality in Europe. Her comments Thursday were her first on the issue in several months, and, together with those out of Washington in recent days, suggest that there won’t be any legislation regarding net neutrality—on either side of the Atlantic—for at least several months. [paidContent:UK/…more]

Disney Earnings Error Prompts Investors to Sell. Walt Disney‘s earnings results were accidentally distributed 15 minutes before the close of the New York Stock Exchange, which prompted a quick decline in stock price of more than four percent. According to the Wall Street Journal, a company official told analysts on a call that they “are investigating how this occurred.” The Wrap and Business Insider reported receiving the release early.  The company announced a 6.7 percent profit decline. [PRNewser/…more]

#IAmSpartacus: Thousands Tweet in Support of Convicted Airport Joker.  The South Yorkshire man who was recently convicted for joking about bombing an airport on Twitter is now just one of many who have done the exact same thing. Paul Chambers’s original tweet, “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” was meant as a joke, but Judge Jacqueline Davis saw things differently. She thought the tweet was “menacing in its content,” dismissing Chambers’s appeal to the original sentence, a £1,000 fine. [Mashable/…more]

CIPR To Launch Updated Guide For Financial And Corporate Comms Practitioners. The guide for financial and corp comms practitioners gives an overview of current legal and regulatory requirements and how those impact on PROs working in the sector. The publication will be launched at a breakfast seminar [on November 30], where Miranda Lane, author of the guide, and a representative from the FSA will talk about the latest regulatory developments. [PRWeek/…more]

UK ‘will run out of web addresses by 2012’. Vint Cerf, a Google vice-president credited with inventing the modern internet, said that the “unbelievable” trend could prevent UK businesses from communicating with their customers around the world and in the UK, and hold back the development of a new wave of connected devices. He told delegates at an internet conference in London that it was “particularly embarrassing for the UK, which had played such a key role in the development of the internet” and said that Britain was a long way behind many other European countries including the Czech Republic. [Telegraph/…more]

Is LinkedIn Finally Ready for Social Media Marketers? With more than 80 million users, LinkedIn has long been the top social network for the business crowd, and has grown quickly as a tool for recruiters and sales teams looking for new leads and connections. But what about brand marketing? Yes, LinkedIn has “Groups,” but they have always driven far less traffic, engagement and brand awareness than Facebook pages or Twitter—and as a result, LinkedIn has always been a something of a second-tier destination for tactical social marketing. With the recent launch of Company Pages, LinkedIn is trying to change that. [The eMarketer Blog/…more]

Gartner Says Social-Networking Services to Replace E-Mail as the Primary Vehicle for Interpersonal Communications for 20 Percent of Business Users by 2014. Greater availability of social-networking-services, coupled with changing demographics and work styles, will lead 20 percent of employees to use social networks as their business communications’ hub by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts said that this is one of a wide range of capabilities that have emerged in communications, social Web and mobile, enabling richer interactions among people and expanding collaboration to a broader level. [Gartner/…more]

Will Your Local Library Lend E-Books? (Or Can They?) Amazon has recently touted that sales of Kindle books are outstripping those of both hardcover and paperback editions. And a Forrester forecast earlier this week gauged that the sales from e-books for 2010 would hit over $1 billion. It seems as though the market for digital literature is strong. But according to some publishers, if libraries start lending e-books, it could serve to "undo the entire market for e-book sales." (ReadWriteWeb/…more]