This speculative news is all over everything (which may mean nothing, as last I checked eBay still hadn’t bought StumbleUpon) - that Microsoft is looking into a merger with Yahoo!. Yeah, that’s huge.

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Even bigger than YouTube! Well, read about it all in this New York Times article. Google’s already raking in money hand over fist in the ad game, and this is another good addition to the pie to add advertisers outside of the Google network. Also check out the press release from Google.

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There’s a bit of a stink that Sam Zell has suggested taking all the newspapers he’s in charge of (via Tribune Co, the company he just bought), pulling them out of Google, and licensing the articles. Tribune Co. includes the major newspapers Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. This is meant to be an end to the free ride enjoyed by the Internet, specifically Google. From the Washington Post:

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

Despite the fact this statement doesn’t make much sense, I essentially could care less, since I don’t read those papers anyway. This move would just mean less AP stories for me to wade through on Google News and in Google Reader.

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April looks to be a good month:

Mac OS X Leopard: Please make it so.

Adobe CS 3: I have my eye on Photoshop and Illustrator at the very least.

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That’s a lot of dough, and I don’t have much to add except this thought: whether or not you think the lawsuit is legitimate, anybody (including me) could have seen this coming a mile away. Back before YouTube was part of Google, people speculated if it would die from bandwidth fees or from being sued.

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One program I lost when my MacBook hard drive died was NetNewsWire Lite, which had all my RSS feed subscriptions. So I’m resubscribing to all those feeds in Google Reader - to ensure that this blogging tragedy never happens again.

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Still getting used to life without a MacBook (the hard drive died). My first realization was not having to tote a laptop bag to work, resulting in a light commute with just an iPod in my pocket.

The second realization was that I had my desktop feed reader on there, so I lost all my bookmarks to 30-40 feeds. Blogging while not knowing what’s going on out there sucks. I’ll have to return to Google Reader.

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In recent weeks, Google has been scurrying like mad trying to get all the big, old entertainment copyright holders to sign YouTube content distribution deals, and allow all its currently, copyright infringing content to remain on the insanely popular video sharing site.

But something about this desperate situation worries me. The implication is that Google really, really, really (no, really) needs that copyrighted content.

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Kind of funny to read this article suggesting that blogs are “parasites” feeding on journalism, and then another profiling “live blogging” - where the latter species of blog is about as far away from the former as you can get.

First, here’s the definition of a parasite:

An organism that lives in or on the living tissue of a host organism at the expense of that host.

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So Viacom is demanding YouTube take down all of its copyrighted content (and they’re doing it). This was surely coming for a while now (and reader Dave notes this isn’t the first time a request from Viacom was received). But I find it a little odd that Google hasn’t figured out a way to parse the commercial content from theuser-created stuff. I mean, all their users can tell the difference.

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