Tuesday is the day for the UK iPhone announcement, it would seem. Apple has gone as far as inviting reporters to a news conference at the Apple Store, so we can assume this involves the confirmation of O2 as the UK carrier, and possibly concurrent announcements for T-Mobile in Germany and Orange in France.

You're not the only one. Quechup has been a getting a lot of backs up in the last week or because of its "trust-abusing" sign-up invitations. I received an invite form a friend I trust... the thought process was that if he is on the site, it is probably worth checking out.

Richard Branson has appealed to Google to help in the search for his friend, the adventurer Steve Fossett, who went missing in a light plane over the Nevada desert three days ago.

US broadcaster HBO has paid something approaching an insane amount of money for the rights to a piece of "machinima" - otherwise known as a film made in Second Life. Reuters the reports that HBO paid six-figures for the rights to the seven-episode "My Second Life: The video diaries of Molotov Alta" - about a guy that disappears in real life only to post dispatches from the second one.

I find visualisation of networks quite fascinating, and also quite useful as a way of contextualising the huge amount of activity in the industry. This latest map from Japan makes more sense if you're familiar with the layout of Tokyo's underground, admittedly, but the connections between sites and the scale of those is very clever.

There is, as yet, no word on a whether a replacement Web Trends map will be provided during industrial action.

Live blogging conferences is one of my favourite professional preoccupations, so this post by Dale Dougherty on O'Reilly rang true. He writes in praise of Scott Beale, who blogged the arson attack on Burning Man's burning man. Rather than posting separate entries as the story developed, he added bullet point-ish updates with each new snippet so the event was chronologically organised. (See also - the legendary Engadget Mac product launches.)

Also: Japan joins race to build the new internet | Yahoo defends action against Chinese dissident | Beatles update

Poor old Apple. No sooner has the tech giant tried to revolutionise the world of mobile phones with an all singing, all dancing shiny fancy handset, than some pesky tech heads come along and work out how to hack the iPhone.

Courtesy of Ben ITV Ayers, there's a super spat going on about PRs targetting bloggers. Something snapped for Tom "thisreallyisessentialwebreading" Coates recently: he's threatening to introduce a page on his blog for people that send him press releases - and the page will feature a large sign that says: "This is not a brothel. There are no prostitutes here."

Jay Rosen, NYU journalism professor and social media blogger, writes very, very long blog posts, but it is worth the effort. The latest tome is in response to (yet another) "bloggers versus journalists" post, which is the subject that solicit a groan from anyone who knows more than a Wikipedia entry's worth about social media.

Wallace and Gromit producers Aardman are the latest to sign up with the video platform Roo for a new player on the official wesbite, wallaceandgromit.com.

You may or may not have noticed that the Rolling Stones are on tour at the moment (aren't they always on tour?) which means a good excuse for lots of Stones-related merchandise for the European leg. Downloads store 7digital is offering a good chunk of past albums for £5.49 each in the new high quality DRM-free format. Tracks are MP3 format but play on any MP3 player, rather than just iPods.

ZDNet's executive editor David Berlind confesses that he was extremely reluctant to make the transition from print journalism to online, and equally resistant to blogging, but found himself "riding a wave of revolution at someone else's insistence while I was really resisting".

Huffington Post is inviting its most active and articulate commenters (are you listening?) to blog on the site. Announcing the new feature, Paul Berry said the site's commenters are "a tremendous and under-utilised resource", so one commenter each month will be chosen to join the HuffPo's blogging squad based on how many fans they have, their tally of "favourite" comments and whatever else catches the moderators' eye.

There has been a flurry of activity at Sky News, where Second Lifers (I know, I know) have been corralled into acting as virtual news reporters. The site is inviting virtual news reports, either on SL events or real-life events re-created in Second Life (is that a good idea? I don't know), that they "film" and work into a two-minute video report.

AT&T is in trouble with its broadband customers after censoring some of a Pearl Jam concert to take out Eddie Vedder's anti-Bush comments. A performance from the Lollapalooza tour was bleeped out, just as the band's cover of Another brick in the wall launched into "George Bush, leave this world alone" and "find yourself another home".

Rebtel has beaten Skype to distribute a internet telephony application through Facebook, due to be added to the site sometime today. "Reb me" allows users to call other Rebtel users for free, but with the crucial difference that you can call from your mobile. Nice.

The LA Times is building on the spirit of Adrian Holovaty's brilliant Chicago Crime.org, which mashed local crime data with Google Maps to create a really powerful interactive information site. The LA Times has come up with the Homicide Map, which visually plots all of the cases listed in the paper's Homicide Report column.