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Exciting times, Friday morning on the way to work I heard the message on the radio that in fact Microsoft was going to buy Yahoo, this story was out last year but ended up as nothing until Friday, to me the rumors had all even disappeared.

Then  the rest of the stories all trickle out.

As we all know google owns the internet right now with something like 65% of the search volume and Yahoo and Microsoft through their properties own much of the rest with Facebook, My Space and the rest of the social media getting the rest. You can really break all of this down in two areas, advertising depth and online pageviews and influence.

Advertising Depth

Microsoft is a very powerful company when it comes to advertising and marketing but they have not been able to won the internet, very strange to me but I am sure there are people that have a  really good idea why being an only somewhat late entrant has costed them so much on the internet, I can not imagine how. Google and the Google AdWords and now Doubleclick networks are easily the number one company on the internet as far as control over advertising and marketing goes and Microsoft in buying Yahoo gets a network to ad to the MSN AdWords type network in Yahoo’s YPN network. This is a real chance for Microsoft to finally get in the game.

Online Pageviews and  Influence

Search is not everything but Google owns that market as I said. As far as content goes you could say that Microsoft and Yahoo own more content then Google but that could change very rapidly. Google at this point is giving us all the services inline that we need be it Google Reader for RSS Google News for getting individualized news, GMail for email and many more things. The big content that Google has of course is YouTube. What we will likely see in the nearer future though is a real push for an office suite that is bigger than Google docs and spreadsheet and of course Google has the datacenter to house all of the data that they need.

So now that  there is probably going to be a merger the fun part left is to watch what each of the companies does with the influence that they have and watching the spin that Google and Microsoft, and even Yahoo throws out there.

In the end the internet is not much different then any other medium that we have had be it books, newspapers, radio or TV in that there will eventually be some kind of consolidation and hopefully enough competition so that hte marketplace does not stagnate as we probably had with Microsoft and the OS and Office suites. We need this competition for innovation but at the same time too much fragmentation on the internet stops the industry from having a big gun or two to have the money to make big change for us. Both Microsoft and Google do have big money.

So now that Amazon has released the Kindle e-book reader you have to wonder if other manufacturers are going to start either screaming, becuase Amazon kind of owns the book market, or furiously pushing out new ebook readers. Right now the only other ebook reader of note is the Sony ebook reader and it has almost no market penetration.

Amazon is really one of the kings of hype and that seems to spill out everywhere. Business Week magazine is calling the Kindle the ebook version of an Ipod and although it looks nothing like an Ipod the white color of this thing has to make you think about Ipods (no plans for an apple reader yet though).

The Kindle offers really great resolution, EVDO, holds a hundred or so books out of the 88,000 book library that Amazon offers and is great for reading Word Documents, newspapers, and even blogs. The Kindle is $399 and is likely to sell a ton of copies this Christmas season.

The wireless connectivity with the Kindle is handled completely  by Amazon so unlike Apple products there is no wireless charges for using the Kindle to hook up to Amazon to buy books.

Click through this link and you can even see a six minute long video of the Kindle in action including a bit of a commercial from Amazon

I have played with Google Reader for a while now and although great News is a great feed reader as well as RSS Owl I keep thinking that bloglines or Google Reader would be the way to go so that I can access my RSS feeds from different computers at home, work or on the road.

First of all I was able to get to Google Reader in Firefox just by typing google reader in the address bar. Next I was able to export my feeds from Great News as a OPML file and then Google Reader allowed me to import the feeds along with their categories that I have spent so much time setting up.

Now I have my feeds and a way to access them. Google has also offered some keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader so theat I can get around the app a bit faster by stating away from the mouse a bit.

The great thing now is that I can look at all of the unread articles from the feeds that I am following and  after reading them all I can mark them that way and next time I am at a web browser I can see all of my newly unread articles.

Google Reader is a very fast and easy way to keep up with all of the news that hte blogs find fit to read.

It seems like it has been years now since Google has had any serious competition as the top search engine. I find that almost 80% of my traffic comes from Google and we all know that the Google Algorithm is great, most of the top results seem good but now we should be expecting more I think.

The only reason that I use Yahoo nowadays is to get sports scores, one of the really nice things on Yahoo is that you can do a search for your sports team and it will show you recent scores and next and previous games above the search results. Google could do this as well but they don’t.

MSN to me, or live as it is now called, does nothing. I find the interface fine but there is not much that draws me to live.com at all.

Google is of course the king of search engines and have great operators like asking the time, getting movie showtimes and even local weather over the search results.

So why do I expect more? Well the internet is not static and even though there are pages and pages created everyday I do not get a feeling for the ebb and flow of news. I go to Digg to get the latest tech and geeky news, I go to various news tracking sites like Techmeme or TailRank or even Newsvine but Google does not seem to be able to do any of this for me.

Perhaps I expect to much from a search engine. A search engine is for finding answers. A portal will only give me the news that I am looking for. And what I want is trends in real time of what the world in general and internet in particular are looking for, at and talking about

I was just hunting around about Apple Iphones coming to Canada and found one company that is selling hacked Iphones in Canada for $985 this is a lot of coin for a product that does not even include the Visual Voicemail feature that is being offered by AT&T in the US.

So let’s say that you do buy a Canadian Iphone for $985(I won’t link because this is a shitty deal) now you need to have a carrier for your phone and data. The only company that has a GSM network in Canada is Rogers and the Iphone needs a GSM network to work at all. Rogers charges a lot for data, in fact apparently they charge three times what a carrier in the US would charge so your Iphine is going to be a bit pricy with all the push-pull of data that an Iphone uses just to do all of the features that you expect for it. The cost would apparently be around $300 per month every month.

The Iphone is the most exciting piece of personal tech to come out in a few years but here in Canada there will have to be some really big changes by the cell carriers to make it work for any person at all in Canada to buy an Iphone.

And if you were hoping that Bell or Telus will start offering the Iphone I am sorry but we are out of luck. The cellular network that is offered by Bell and Telus in Canada is different and is part of the business plan that those companies have. The cost would be at least a couple billion dollars to change the networks as the network, cell towers, and infrastructure is completely different than the GSM network that an Iphone in Canada would need.

I have tried to move all of my blogs over from MT 3.34 to MT 4 and have been fighting for a week now as I can not successfully rebuild my archive pages. I am not some newbie with this having been using Movable Type for three years now so here are my recommendations.

I am right now still struggling with this and have tried everything from reloading my cgi-bin and static files to even recreating a new database and trying to import a blog into a brand new database but still get 500 errors whenever I try to rebuild my archives page. I have been to the movable type forum but the answer that one user gave me did not work although getting rid of bad plugins was a great idea that I had not though of.

1. Setup a new database and do some testing, make a new blog in a new subfolder with a fresh release of MT 4.0 and import your entries and copy your templates over. Check your performance.

2. Take this chance to look at your code and make sure that everything is setup properly in all of your templates. Keep your pages as lean as possible just to make everything work better for your users.

3. Try all of the different browsers and test your code? Do the pages render properly, or just even good enough?

After you have done these test which should only take a couple hours at most then you will feel a lot more confident going forward. The upgrade to 4.0 only takes about 10-20 minutes and that is mostly all of the files copying over FTP.

Gina at lifehacker has compiled and written a great little extension for gmail that you can get from her site.

Lifehacker Code Update: Better Gmail Firefox extension version 0.7 now available - Lifehacker

To me so far the best part about this Firefox extension is the fact that all of those mailto: links on pages can now become gmail email links so that I can have work stuff for work and use my gmail to email much more efficiently. How does this work? Well if you have the extension installed you will see a little gmail envelope beside any links to that are email links on a page. Click on the gmail icon and it will being up a new tab with the compose email window for gmail and the email address already populated in the to: field

One of my favorite pastimes when I have a little downtime at work or at home is catching up with some the 200 or so rss feeds that I have in my feed reader. As some people know I have used a few in the past. I settled on SharpReader last year but thanks to Dave at work I have found a new and great newsreader that helps me blog as well.

Great News is an RSS reader with a twist. While I used to like having articles that I read sometimes open up in a new Firefox or IE window I also like the fact the Great News will open a new tab within the app itself when I open up a new link from within a post.

The single greatest feature to me though of Great News is that if I want to blog a post that I am reading then Great News, with the click of a “blog this” link will allow me to post right from a new tab with a link to the post itself for ease and convenience. When I do the blog this in Great News it actually opens up a new post page for my Movable Type this is differenct becasue usually any other tool that I know of just uses the mt-xmlprc connection but this method that Great News uses actually gives me more flexability and control.

And to go along with the whole open source aspect of blogging of course Great News is free.

Sometime over the last day or do it looks like Google updated the personalized page feature.

If you have not used the personalized page feature it is a fantastic way to keep up with news and RSS feeds that you see updated throughout the day all that you need to do is use the add button at the top left of the page and you can add any valid RSS feed, or other widget, allowed by Google. Previously the Google personalized page just had links to the stories but now there is a change that there is a plus sign. When you click on the plus sign the story will expand and give you what ever RSS feature that is there, either partial or full fee of the story.

This is I believe one of the strongest features that Google had before and now it is much better than it was. Another example of simple ways that Google is adding small features that really impact and help end users.

Web 2.0 can be broken down into three major types of sites. The first is news type sites like Digg, reddit and Newsvine.

The second popular type of site is the blog type sites like MySpace, Nexopia and Facebook.

The third major type of Web 2.0 sites are Social bookmarking sites like delicious and blogmarks as well as many others.

The Social Bookmarking Faceoff

The above page reviews all of the major players for social network bookmarking and is really great if you are wondering about the relative size of all of these services and the extra features that each offer. The leaders according to the site are:

Blinklist
Delicious
Diigo - which I had not heard of until today
Magnolia
Shadows
Simpy

Traffic wise Stumble upon is a great site as well.