--The Wall Street Journal has some not-so-nice things to say about Seattle's BillMonk in its profile today of blogger Michael Arrington:

Some of the companies Mr. Arrington writes about are tiny and have questionable business models, like BillMonk, a company owned by Code Monks LLC that lets people use its online service to settle small debts between friends -- free of charge. The site may soon impose a small fee for fund transfers, though, and BillMonk co-founder Guarav Oberoi says he's confident the site will be successful. Mr. Arrington concedes he gets pitched about some "heroically dumb stuff," but he says many companies "deserve their moment in the limelight."

-- The Electronics Entertainment Expo has been significantly scaled down for next year to a smaller and more intimate video game trade show. But a second show just announced today promises to revive blustery theatrics of E3 next October. Organizers of the GamePro Expo show are predicting it will draw 30,000 attendees to Los Angeles -- that's about half of E3's attendance.

-- A new phrase, "Web science," enters the techie lexicon today with an announcement from MIT and a U.K. university that they plan to begin researching the field. The research will be led by Tim Berners-Lee, widely credited with creating the Web's basic infrastructure.
Web science will try to study the big picture of the Web, including social networks and the way people behave on the Web.

-- Mobile madness: Google upgrades its Gmail service for wireless phones, and YouTube says it wants to launch a service for mobile devices within a year.