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A celebration of the riches of the web.

The entrepreneurial skills of Somali pirates and Madonna's health go arm-in-arm in only one place - Web Monitor. If you find an interesting link, share it with us by sending it via the comment box.

• Web Monitor is going out on a limb now, or two limbs to be precise, to talk about Madonna's arms. Her very ripped arms are muscling in all over the internet.
to an exhibit by anatomist Gunther Von Hagens.

Other papers can't resist the wordplay, with she's always been a big hitter, and "you're so vein".

of putting the story in the tittle-tattle part of the paper, and instead places it in the business section, saying Madonna looks like "something out of Night of the Living Dead".

The bloggers steer clear of the puns but leave little doubt as to their reaction, with :

"When I saw these pictures of Madonna's arms, I threw up in my mouth a little."

• Fabulously successful innovators who reinvest their profits into training and equipment. Sounds like a reference for funding from the Princes Trust, but actually is the appraisal of Somali Pirates from . Carney analyses the Somali pirate business model:

"Like any business, Somali piracy can be explained in purely economic terms. It flourishes by exploiting the incentives that drive international maritime trade. The other parties involved - shippers, insurers, private security contractors, and numerous national navies - stand to gain more (or at least lose less) by tolerating it than by putting up a serious fight. As for the pirates, their escalating demands are a method of price discovery, a way of gauging how much the market will bear."

• Web Monitor is tracking the ongoing "Free" debate sizzling online. According to Chris Anderson, everything will become free but this is impossible. Only yesterday Web Monitor flagged up on the question of if you started to have to pay for websites, which ones would you cough up for. And the snarkmarket blog has been looking specifically at what the prospect of "free" would mean to people working in the liberal arts. eventually people will do fun jobs for free:

"Now, in the previous economic paradigm, it was possible to do work that you would have done for less or for free and still be paid well for it, because it was too much trouble for your employers/clients to find someone who could do the work as well and for free. But the internet drastically reduces that barrier. Imagine trying to find people to write a computer operating system and all the associated applications without expecting payment before the internet - now look at Linux.
I wonder if we're heading toward an economy where, to put it bluntly, people don't get paid for doing fun things. If something is fun - for someone in the world who finds it fun enough to become good at it, and to do it without expecting pay - it will no longer pay."

• The taxi dancer is seeing a resurgence in Germany. Dancers for hire from anything from one dance to a whole evening are earning money as singletons latch onto the ballroom craze.
rather taken by the idea:

"Amid the twirling skirts and suited gentlemen in a grand and vaulted space, I fell in love. Everyone moved so well; everyone looked so lovely. When one of the taxi dancers asked me to the floor, I was thrilled. But then I was flustered. Surrounded by such anachronistic grace, I felt all too aware of the fact that my waltz, foxtrot and jive lessons were more than 30 years old (though my professional dance partner was far too good to let me look foolish)."

• Still in Germany a case that will determine who owns the right to yodel:

"The textless singing in rapidly changing pitch has been used since the Stone Age to seek help, express delight at the wonders of nature and woo milkmaids ... The legal dispute focuses on who composed the unforgettable yodelling refrain "Holla-rä-di-ri, di-ri, di-ri" in the Kufstein Song, one of the most famous Alpine folk songs, a perennial hit in beer tents at the Munich Oktoberfest."

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