By Jon Bridges

It's been a strange couple of weeks on the internet in New Zealand. Do you ever have those times when it seems like the internet has gone quiet? That what were once thriving blogs, teeming auction sites and humming news servers just seem like ghost halls of the long dead? I'm not saying it happened yet, just that it might do, and how weird it will be.Wandering from site to site, "is anybody theeeerrrrreeeee?", everything downloading in an instant, no more comments left, no one asking for an 'add'. (If Myspace has done nothing else, it can feel proud that it has turned a quiet verb like 'add' into a very happening noun.) Come May, however, it won't be quiet at all in New Zealand, because it's NZ Music Month.

Despite the folding of seminal NZ hip hop label Dawn Raid, this seventh celebration of our music is going to be quite large by all accounts, starting with big events in Christchurch and the Coromandel.

I know the idea of this column is to point to things that are happening on the internet, and I wanted to point to the Music Month gig webcasts, but I can't find any! Just because we aren't eating whole meals in pill-form and wearing rocketpacks, doesn't mean we can't watch live music on the internet. Is this the future or not?

A frightening album release just in time for music month is the Christina Elenni album Welcome to Me. I don't understand what's happening here, and it makes me feel wrong and scared. Mix the awesome Wing with Gwen Stefani and add a bit of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert for a feeling of what can happen when New Zealand Music Month goes very wrong.

It's the pointy end of the Cricket World Cup, and as I write the Black Caps are asleep in the Caribbean dreaming of beating Sri Lanka in tonight's semi-final. The best Cricket World Cup blog by far is on our own Public Address webblog, and can be found on the guest speaker section of the site. No doubt by the time you read this there will be excellent comment by Hamish McDouall et al on what happened in the game.

On the theme of Kiwis doing well overseas, check out Threadless, a t-shirt design website in the United States that takes submissions from anyone, then uses a member voting system to rate those designs. The highest-rating designs have the honour of being printed and sold through the website, and they are very, very funky - check out this one.

Threadless has the honour of being one of the approximately one million nominees for Webby awards recently announced, but the best thing about the website is that one of the most successful designers on there is a genius called Glenn Jones, from New Zealand. Glenn works at Dashwood Design in Mt Eden where I'm sure he does some very nice stuff, but he is a genuine star on Threadless, where his fourteen accepted designs makes him one away from being the most prolifically accepted designer.

Staying with the theme of Kiwi designed t-shirts, but moving to a website closer to home, Mr Vintage has a lovely range of Kiwiana t-shirts that will make you click on the 'Add to Cart' button. I just bought three t-shirts - one for everyone who lives at my house.

But now what's really starting to worry me is how many websites I have joined, registered on, become a member of and signed up to. What if we find out one day that habitual website registration causes some sort of disease, for which the cure is unknown? What if there's a limit to how many passwords a person can make up, and like human ova, when they run out, they run out? Imagine how sick you'd be that you'd joined up to MSN in 1999 and now you couldn't join freeicecream.co.nz! What if I lose the piece of paper that I have written down all my passwords on, or what if someone steals it and has a huge session of stealing my money, buying things at auction, booking flights, writing bogus blogs and ruining my reputation on oldfriends.co.nz? Fortunately, there are programmes designed to help you manage your passwords in very clever ways. One is called Roboform, and one that works on Macs is called Wallet.

And to end, a recommendation: Pandora. If you haven't seen it before, it's a website the works like your own radio station, playing songs you might like based on a song or band you seed it with. With broadband, it plays continuously in the background and so often makes me go "oh, what is that band?". Highly recommended.