You're a sporting superstar who, despite being acquitted of murdering your ex-wife and her friend, still has the weight of public suspicion hanging over you. What do you do? Agree to partake in a question-and-answer session on the net that charges punters $9.95 a time to view your answers. That will win them over, surely? Of course, this is exactly what OJ Simpson did last Thursday on the AskOJ.com site. Entertainment Network, the company that set up the site, insists all the proceeds are going to charity. (Remember, Simpson owes $33.5m in damages following a separate civil case.) The company's eagerness to state its stance on the issue did not end there: the website includes a hefty footnote announcing its neutrality and the $100,000 reward it is offering for information leading to arrest of the murderer(s). The question session itself, however, hardly seemed worth the fee. During the questioning, Simpson "opened up", saying that he still misses his ex-wife Nicole, adding: "I get angry with the people she was hanging around with who contributed to this ... These were her party friends. So, yes, I do think partially her lifestyle contributed to it."

Another celebrity keen to make his mark on the internet is Sting. Trouble is, someone else has already encamped themselves at sting.com - where they've been for the past eight years as it happens. Sting, as is customary with aggrieved pop stars, called in the lawyers. But in a rare victory for the seemingly little guy (see Napster's tussle with the music industry), arbitrators in the US ruled last week that Sting could not stop the domain name being used by someone else as Sting is not his real name, nor is it a trademark and it's a common word. There was much rejoicing at a forum especially set up at Sting.com following the ruling. "Who do these celebrities think they are that they should just get whatever they want just because they want it?" wrote "Rob14224".

And still they fall. Boo.com has already gone, ClickMango.com, the natural health e-tailer, announced this week that it is to close and news reached us, too, that Inspop.com, an insurance site, had probably wasted about £5m on advertising before its site was even ready for customers. Its Terminator spoof advertisement - "Renewal Day" - had been airing for two weeks on national TV but a technical fault, which meant the site could not talk to the insurance companies for whom it was selling, made the whole campaign look a bit useless. The company denied that a large chunk of its venture capital had gone up in smoke: "We've had an immense number of hits and we're developing name awareness." They have had an immense hit, all right.