140 characters is a long time in politics, so how do you measure the impact of an individual tweet? Tweetminster, the Twitter tool that aggregates the tweets of politicians, this morning launched a real-time search function, at a breakfast attended by politicians, journalists and bloggers.

Co-founder of the service, Alberto Nardelli, calls it a "sentiment engine"; searching for terms brings up a variety of metrics, including the number of relevant tweets about a subject, how these tweets 'feel' about the subject, how many people have seen the tweets and the individuals with the most impact on the subject.

The document-leaking site Wikileaks says it’s preparing to release 500,000 intercepted pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Site operators say they plan to start rolling out the texts beginning at 3am New York time (8am GMT), paced to display as they were broadcast at the corresponding time on September 11, 2001. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8.46am local time, and United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower 17 minutes later.

Wired Italy has nominated the internet for the next Nobel Peace Prize, in a campaign dubbed Internet for Peace. The project will be featured in the next issue of Wired Italy, and is being supported by Nobel Peace Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi, Professor Umberto Veronesi and the stylist Giorgio Armani, along with the support of Wired US Editor Chris Anderson and Wired UK Editor David Rowan.

The Church of Scientology has been convicted of fraud and fined €600,000 (£540,000) by a French court. The criminal conviction is an apparent first against the group, which benefits from constitutional protections in the United States but does not enjoy that sanctuary elsewhere in the world.

The French court, after a five-month trial, may have been inclined to ban the church entirely, but a change in the relevant law just before the trial began made that moot. As well as the €600,000 fine, the court also handed down suspended jail sentences of up to two years and fines of up to €30,000 (£27,000) to four leaders of the group’s French branch, according to press reports.

In yet another chapter of the painfully slow sinking of the good ship Pirate Bay, a Swedish court has postponed hearings that were originally scheduled for next month, and are now expected to occur as late as summer next year.

The delay has been instigated to accommodate a fresh review of bias allegations that were originally levelled at two of the judges set to rule on the case. It was alleged that they have ties with pro-copyright groups. Although the charges were originally thrown out, the ruling was appealed and there is a chance it may appear before the Supreme Court.

The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google's search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.

The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site's spare landing page contains no content to speak of - just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.

Google's drive to create the online library and bookstore of the future is being delayed indefinitely after the judge overseeing a controversial settlement with the world's authors and publishers over copyright issues postponed an upcoming hearing, citing opposition from the US and foreign governments.

Federal district court judge Denny Chin cancelled the so-called fairness hearing on October 7, since Google is currently re-negotiating the agreement with the plaintiffs. Those negotiations over Google Book Search re-opened after the Justice Department weighed in with a critical filing last Friday that effectively killed the version that had been under intense public discussion for nearly a year.

But, critically, Chin found the settlement negotiations should not be scuttled yet.

"On the other hand, the proposed settlement would offer many benefits to society," Chin wrote. "It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit."