Microsoft, Yahoo Deal Would Strengthen Google I’m getting might pissed off with all this talk about some “deal” between Microsoft and Yahoo now. I don’t see how Microsoft forking out $15 billion for Yahoo’s search business would have any impact on Google’s share. Sure, on paper, Yahoo’s share would drop to 0% and Microsoft would jump from 8.5% to 29%, but Google’s share would still sit at 63.1%. (Based on comScore’s latest figures.) Today, a large Yahoo shareholder, Ivory Investment Management urged the company to sell to Microsoft to maximise shareholder value. How...

IE8: Saviour of the Semantic Web, or Usability Nightmare? I’ve been pushing web standards for years, so the news that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 will support W3C guidelines by default is very welcome from where I’m sitting. There is one problem, though. They’ve announced that sites including CNN, Facebook and MySpace won’t work correctly. Users of the browser will have to choose to view these sites in “Compatibility View”. That sounds painful. It smacks of the “cancel or allow” ‘safety‘ feature in Vista. It’s great that Microsoft are finally supporting standards....

LinkedIn Squatting: Claim a Company for Your Own! According to LinkedIn, I am now the proud owner of a company. How so? Because I told them I was. Why did they believe me? Because they didn’t bother to check. I gave them an e-mail address that in no way resembling the company’s web address and in return they let me create and play around with the company profile. As I write this I’m searching around my head for ways that LinkedIn could verify company employees but as yet my brain is returning a 404 (wow, that was geeky). Luckily for LinkedIn the company is a client of mine and I’m simply in the process...

LinkedIn Now Major Factor in Online Reputation I’ve not been much of a fan of LinkedIn. It’s too closed off and there just aren’t enough ways to interact. I prefer networking through the likes of Twitter or Facebook. One example is how easy it is to create a presence for your company or brand. Previously, LinkedIn only gave you the ability to create your personal profile. Facebook, on the other, with fan pages, makes it easy to both establish a brand presence and encourage people to interact. The closed nature of LinkedIn alienated it from the rest of the social media space, in a way, because it didn’t...

This Will Stop You Having Regrets My Mom once told me that jealousy is a wasted emotion. It’s true, and it helped to open my eyes. That and show me another trait I’ve inherited from my Dad. In a similar vein I’ve always thought that having regrets is pointless. Instead, learning from our mistakes is better. To that end I’ve always mantained that I don’t have regrets. Now watch this video (via Chris Brogan): It made me think about all those things that we know we need to do, or should do, but just don’t. And how we eventually end up having regrets just because we didn’t...

ARGH! Where’s your RSS feed?! Seriously, folks, if you’re going to have a blog you need to give me your RSS feed. As I scan the net for news that interests me I get increasingly frustrated with the number of times I found myself looking around for the RSS feed. A blog isn’t a blog without an RSS feed. That’s what makes blog different from just a news site or just someone’s page of ramblings. An RSS feed (or Atom if you’re one of those people who likes to be different) is there so that interested folks like me can subscribe to your musings without having to remember to visit...

Brits Love Blogs 41% of the UK’s internet population have visited a blog, according to comScore. The study shows that in August, 14.5 million people in the UK visited at least one blog, showing just how popular blogging is becoming. It demonstrates just how important blogging is to the British internet user. And a reminder to businesses that to market their site effectively, they need to consider the blogosphere as part of their online marketing strategy. For further on the subject you can view the comScore press release.

Make Parliamentary Scrutiny More Accessible The Free Our Bills campaign from mySociety is today encouraging supporters to ask their MPs to sign Early Day Motion (EDM) 2141. The campaign aims to get Parliament to publish bills in a much better way which will allow software developers to come up with new and innovative ways to present bills to the public and build tools around them. It’s another project from mySociety, a non-profit organisation, organised by volunteers who aim to “build websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives” and to “teach...

T-Mobile Attempting to Entice Customers; Uses a Really Lame Phone Again, via InformationWeek I learn that T-Mobile is going to try and get new customers by enticing them in with the Motozine ZN5. The phone boasts a 5-Megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 350MB of internal memory, a built-in organiser, voice recording capabilities, MP3 player, FM radio, TV-out capabilities, standard headphone jack and a 2.4-inch display with capable of 240 x 320 resolution. It’s ONLY $99 with a two-year contract. Last year, Nokia brought out the Nokia N95 (which I own and enjoy). It has everything the ZN5 has, but it’s much better. For a start, it...

This is Why Android Will Beat the iPhone Apple are going to lose out to Google and others in the battle for the mobile market unless they book their ideas up and give users what they want. Case in point: Opera. Via InformationWeek I’ve learnt that iPhone users will have to go without the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers because Apple won’t allow them into the App Store. This is a great shame. I’ve heard good things about the Opera browsers and although I do love the iPhone browser I believe in giving users choice. Google, on the other hand, with the Android Marketplace, are allowing any applications...