Caroline McCarthy / CNET News.com:
Gibson turns volume up to 11 with new ‘Guitar Hero’ lawsuit  —  Legendary guitar manufacturer Gibson Guitar has sued six major retailers—Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Amazon.com, Gamestop, and Toys-R-Us—for selling Activision’s Guitar Hero video game series, MarketWatch reported Friday.

Erick Schonfeld / TechCrunch:
Breaking: FCC Confirms that Big Winner in Spectrum Auction is Verizon.  So Why Is Google Smiling?  —  The big winner of the FCC’s $19.6 billion auction of wireless spectrum that ended yesterday is Verizon.  That was pretty much everyone’s guess.  —  At a press conference today …

Stefanie Olsen / CNET News.com:
Q&A: Battelle talks blog roll-ups, Google, and Federated Media’s future  —  John Battelle knows tech booms and busts.  He’s been at the forefront of them for nearly two decades.  —  In 1993, he co-founded Wired, a print magazine that set a standard in technology coverage and spawned popular sites … […]

Farhad Manjoo / Salon:
The Wall Street Journal’s Web site is already (secretly) free  —  Late in January, Rupert Murdoch put an end to speculation that he would set free the Wall Street Journal’s subscription-only Web site.  —  While he planned to “expand” the site’s free offerings, “the really special things …

Paul Miller / Engadget:
Sony hates you, offers $50 “Fresh Start” option to build your laptop crapware-free  —  Sony has quite the history of crippling excellent, beautiful hardware with horrible, useless software.  The company’s UX UMPC bluescreened on us the first time we turned it on, and crashed the first time we tried …

Sarah Perez / ReadWriteWeb:
The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere  —  We’ve seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we’ve questioned whether they’re adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload.  (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example).

Katie Marsal / AppleInsider:
Apple pushing Safari downloads on Windows users  —  In an apparent bid to rapidly gain share of the online browser market dominated by rival Microsoft, Apple is leveraging its vast iTunes install base to recommend that Windows users also download and install the latest version of its Safari web browser.

Mark Hendrickson / TechCrunch:
LinkedIn, Now For Companies  —  LinkedIn, the boring social network that won’t find you a date but may land you a job, is expanding beyond people profiles.  —  On Friday morning they will launch company profile pages that partly serve as fact sheets for about 160,000 companies and partly serve … […]

Ionut Alex Chitu / Google Operating System:
Google’s Broken Bookmarking Systems  —  Google hasn’t yet launched a proper bookmarking system.  Google Bookmarks was just a small extension of Search History and became more useful after the integration with Google Toolbar.  Notebook lets you clip content from the web …