A few interesting articles and tidbits from the gaming world today:

The New York Times has an interesting take and detailed history of the battle of the bands raging between "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock" from Activision and MTV's "Rock Band," two hot-selling, multi-platform titles.

Microsoft today announced another social-networking feature that will be added to the Xbox Live Dashboard with a Dec. 4 update. Gamers will be able to expose their friends lists to everyone or just their own friends. You know the old song, make new friends, but keep the old. That's the idea here. The company's press release on this feature noted there are now 8 million people on Xbox Live.

No big surprise here, but November online video game sales in the weeks before "Black Friday" were up 134 percent from a year ago, according to comScore. That's the fastest growing e-commerce category and outpaced the overall growth rate for retail e-commerce (excluding travel sales) of 17 percent in the period.

Update: Sony just crowed about its Black Friday sales. Here's the digits: PlayStation 3 sales up 245 percent from Black Friday 2006 (when the new console had been on the market only a matter of days and was significantly more expensive than competitors' consoles). Since dropping its prices and introducing a 40 gigabyte model Nov. 2, PS3 sales are up 298 percent.