I know it is Christmas and I should be thinking about gift for other people, but I couldn't help myself want to find out a bit more about a beautiful box set called 'How low can you go: Anthology of the string bass'.

So first port of call - Amazon.co.uk.

It's there - hooray. Crikey it's expensive - £53.98.

But look it's OK, Amazon has it as a download for £5.89. Sounds too good to be true (although I really want the box and the book, but never mind).

So I clicked away and got this.

Right then - it is too good to be true. What's this album then? Well it does have the word 'low' in the title but that is about the extent of the similarity. I checked a few other things I am fond of and the same thing happened - bad data links all over the place.

So what went wrong? Why has Amazon with its enviable data on everything messed this up? Is it because there are no unigue IDs pinning the service together? Is it because the blurriest of searches on a data set describing something as vast as music will nearly always get it wrong? It seems there is still a difficult road ahead to get this giant database stuff right and a lot for us to learn about what corners can still not be cut.
Justin

This is well worth 15 minutes of your time: radical theorist-open source evangelist-graphic novelist Douglas Rushkoff discusses why the system of money which arose in the late middle ages is essentially broken for the Internet age. It's a pretty freewheeling rant and suffers for that occasionally (no musical innovation on the last 20 years? Er, hello?Meshuggah anyone, or Burial? And has he heard all the world's music in that time? Anyway, sore point.)

But for all that, it's good to hear a different commentary on Web 2.0 - an alternative to the Utopians and the professionally weary refuseniks.

I won't even attempt to explain this... not least because I've barely grasped some of it meself... More bleeding edge tech from MIT, this time a "bidirectional" screen which can track the "viewer's" gestures and translate them into on-screen activity. Oh just watch it and you'll get it; it's pretty special.