Microsoft announced today that it has made an offer to buy Yahoo for nearly $45 billion dollars. The move would allow Microsoft and Yahoo to join forces to compete against Google in the Web search market.

Currently, Google controls about 80 percent of the worldwide Web search market while Yahoo is second with about 16 percent and Microsoft third with 4 percent.

If the buy out is successful it would be interesting to see how this affects Google’s current market dominance and if either Microsoft and/or Yahoo will drastically change their search algorithms in any way which could result in changes in search engine optimization techniques used by webmasters.

AddThis.com offer a variety of tools that helps users bookmark your web site or blog as well as subscribe to any feeds you may have. The service is free and involves just placing a couple lines of code on any page you want the AddThis button to appear. In addition, the service tracks all pages bookmarked and the social bookmarking services used which can be viewed from the online user interface. An example button is shown below:

PalTalk plans to add video streams to certain PalTak chat rooms so that users can now watch videos simultaneously while chatting about the content of the videos. The video content will initially come from Heavy.com, ManiaTV, blip.tv, and Rip.tv.

I can see that if the new service becomes popular on PalTalk that video sites such as YouTube and others may add similar simultaneous viewing and chatting capabilities to their sites. This type of service could also become popular with advertisers and producers looking for detailed feedback from test audiences. Instead of surveying the audience for feedback after viewing the presentation, they could access the actual logs of the conversations as they took place real time. This could become a large revenue source for popular video sites.

A new webmaster tool at Smartpagerank.com allows users to view the backlinks for any domain as well as the PageRank of each of these backlinks. In addition, the tool allows you to see the anchor tag used with each backlink as well as if a “nofollow” tag is part of the link. The application is an excellent resource to check the status of your link building strategies or to get a better understand of where your backlinks come from.

As a result of the Megan Meier case, her home town of Dardenne Prairie, Missouri is voting on whether to make Internet harassment a crime in its jurisdiction.

Megan Meier is the 13-year-old girl who committed suicide on October 16th, 2006 after meeting a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans on Myspace. It turned out that the Evans profile was created by the mother of one of Meier’s former friends for the purpose of calling her names and harassing her.

The proposed ordinance would make online harassment a Class B misdemeanor in Dardenne Prairie, punishable by a $500 fine and up to 90 days in jail.

Although I see the need for measures to prevent tragedies such as this from happening I also see these types of laws as sometimes being too open ended. What will be defined as harassment? How will they determine the actual identity of the person harassing, etc.

Google is now Wall Street’s golden child. Like Microsoft in the 90s, Google is now the make of millionaires. According to the New York Times, there are an estimated one thousand Google employees whose company stock options and grants are worth over a million dollars. This includes Google’s former masseuse, Bonnie Brown.

Additionally, anyone who only joined Google just a year ago has stock options and grants worth an estimated $276,000. So, maybe its time I brushed off my resumes and sent it off to Google?

eBay has just launched a new site called eBay Neighborhoods that contains over 600 small social networks, each centered around a unique product. Each network includes content pulled from eBay including blogs, reviews, etc. and also allows users to add new content such as forums, photos, etc.

Only time will tell how these networks will stack up against other social shopping networks. But with its current user base, if done correctly, eBay could soon be the top player in the field.

Apple has announced that it has already sold over one million phones and expects sales to continue to be strong. According to Steve Jobs in a recent press release, Apple has sold “One million iPhones in 74 days—it took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod”.

With the success of iPhone and the iPod, it makes you wonder what iThingy Apple will release next. Maybe an iInfringe to download even more illegal music or the iAdultDiaper for the iPod/iPhone user on the go. What do you think the next iThingy should be?

A new project called the Dark Web Project has been developed at the University of Arizona’s Artificial Intelligence Lab for the purpose of finding and examining online locations where terrorists may work to recruit new members. The project’s goal is to collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.

Recent reports have estimated that there are several thousand Web sites created and maintained by known international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, that attempt to recruit new members to their organizations. So next time you are player a multi-player online Star Wars game, think twice about who is behind the Darth Vader mask asking you to join the Dark Side/Web.

A new blog has popped up within the MSDN blogs over at Microsoft. The title is “hackers @ microsoft” with a url of http://blogs.msdn.com/hackers/. Currently, there is only a single post to the blog from a user named techjunkie.

According to the post, “Microsoft employs some of the best hackers in the world and actively recruits them and develops them”. These so called “white hat hackers” currently hack Microsoft applications prior to release to find weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

What I found interesting in the post was the statement, “A true hacker is someone who is curious and wants to learn how systems work. This can and of course at Microsoft is done in an ethical, legal manner”. Ethical, legal manner? Does this mean that Microsoft has fired all its programmers that are part of the their special “reversed engineering” team?