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A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: the folly of searching for raw talent, made-up research and the people against the piano.

• X-Factor winner Leona Lewis on Woman's Hour questions the idea that contests like the X-Factor pluck raw talent from obscurity. She went to two stage schools herself and said that previous training was crucial:

"I had a lot of singing lessons from a very young age... I know the proper techniques of singing and I know how to look after my voice and that's important when you've got live performances every week... If you have someone who has raw talent and hasn't really developed it or had proper training, I think it can be quite hard to take on everything that happens afterwards."

• At Prof Hacker, a blog dedicated to tips and tutorials for higher education that making up research is endemic in academia:

"Faking it is a crucial way to get anything accomplished. Many abstracts for conferences or proposals for books or sabbaticals or anything else are written before the project described therein is finished, or sometimes even started. You build a constituency for a new course in part by positing its existence, and then trusting that a successful iteration of it will lead to even more interested students."

• At us that complaining about the copyright issues around technology is nothing new. It's as older than the video cassette recorder, older than the photocopier at least and as old as the gramophone and piano:

"The great irony of these debates is that most new devices become popular only because buyers really want them, which means they open whole new markets that can then be monetized by rightsholders."

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