• Diary is pleased to bring you yet another gob-smacking, must-enter competition. Courtesy of Pagecount, diary has five dot.com monopoly sets to give away - well somebody has to give them away seeing as most of the "properties" are, ahem, currently in limbo. But they're the kitschest, most essential coffee table accessory a net-kid can boast, and everyone wants one. Honest. What feat do you have to perform to land one? Simple: just send an email to yours truly with your own entries for a dot.com graveyard monopoly board. And we may even develop our own version of the game ...
• Diary is busy saving up for Zoom, Arcadia and Associated Newspapers' ISP. While arguably Zoom is one of the better ISPs around, it is still fish-out-of-water territory for the retailer and the publisher, especially now that practically all the other fishies that threw money at ISPs a few years ago have got out. Publicly, Arcadia boss Stuart Rose has been hinting that Zoom is a "non-core loss-making asset" that he was not content to carry on supporting, but they daren't yet say the dreaded: that they'd like to offload it. Diary implores you Stuart - come to us first.
• AOL's been getting it in the neck lately, and quite deservedly. For yonks they have had subscribers by the short and curlies, locking them into a service that it is near-impossible to escape from. Public backlash ahoy. Radio 5 Live and BBC2's Working Lunch have got on the case, and punters have mailed Diary with their sad plight - how the heck do you end a subscription with AOL? Mr Michael Duffy, from Click Thinking, said it took him hours - and no fewer than 15 phone calls - to get connected to an operator on the cancellation line. Even then, they tried to talk him out of cancelling by offering him a free month. The cheek of it, says Duffy, who now has bunny-boiler nightmares every time he sees AOL's glamorous computer genie Connie pop up on TV. Nasty.
• An extraordinary marketing ploy from 192.com, the scary information people database, landed in Diary's inbox last week. It claimed to be from a friend in "Sunny Barbados" - a Sarah Anderson (who?) at the email address mailout@192.com who says she'll "turn my business around" and fly me out to the Caribbean for free. Intrigued, Diary calls up the freephone number ("it patches straight through to me here on the beach") and discovered the rotten truth. "Oh it's just a marketing gimmick for 192.com's new CD-rom," pipes the girl at the other end, "I can enter you into the prize draw though if you like." Reassuringly she concludes: "Don't be worried, we've had a lot of people call up confused by the promotion." So clearly it worked then.
• Amy Vickers is new media editor of MediaGuardian.co.uk
