It’s been a bit of a slow (or is that busy?) period over the holidays, but here’s an assortment of various wikinomics-related news stories of interest from the last few days that might be of interest:

Warner selling music without DRM: This falls into the “it’s about bloody time!” part of the news spectrum… but I’d be willing to bet that this transition to DRM free music still has a few more major hurdles to cross. You know, like if the recording industry incumbents were stupid enough to sue people for transfering music they legally bought in CD form onto their computers. Wow.

Charles Eicher has a fascinating article in the Register entitled How to copyright Michelangelo, which details how cultural icons can become commercial properties. To give you a bit of a taste for where this article goes, it starts with Pope Sixtus IV, goes all the way to Bill Gates, and ends with the sentence “but copyright only works if we can reign in the robber barrons.” Personally, I would have like to have seen the article written in the form of “Bill Gates, Michelangelo, and Pope Sixtus IV walk into a bar…”, but that’s just me… it’s an excellent read.

AOL announced it’s discontinuing support of Netscape Navigator, which I’m sure is a shock to everyone who thought it was discontinued many years ago. The only reason I mention it is that apparently 90%+ of the web population used it in the mid 1990s, and now about 6 people do… things can change quickly.

The New York Times has an interesting article on what the legions of newly-minted Google millionaires are looking to do next… which is apparently much more than swim around in pools of their money like Scrooge McDuck. The most interesting quote from the article in relation to wikinomics: “We are planning to bring all the ex-Googlers who are starting companies and investing in companies together to tighten up the network.”

Match.com has become the first dating site to partner directly with Facebook, via the “little black book” application.  It will be interesting to see if that works, because a lot of the dating sites are in a hecukva lot of trouble right now (Match.com’s daily traffic ranking has dropped from about 100 to about 600 in the last few years).

While everyone is paying so much attention to the looming Microsoft / Google slugfest, few have noticed that none other than Paul Allen is saddling up to bid on U.S. wireless spectrum through his company Vulcan Ventures. What Mr. Allen does might be worth paying attention to.

These are just a few of the stories that abound… and we look forward to bringing more of them directly to the wikinomics community in the new year.