Image Courstesy Businessweek.com

HOLY SMOKES!  I am completely blown away by the moves of Yahoo this week, in an effort to stave off the Microsoft takeover.  As of yesterday for a two week trial, Google will handle advertising for a tiny piece of the searches carried out on Yahoo.  In fact, Google will place ads alongside 3% of the U.S. queries on Yahoo’s site.  GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS ON YAHOO!!!  It would appear that instead of being eaten by the lion, Yahoo would prefer to throw itself into the dragon’s mouth!  I’d LOVE to hear what you all have to say about that, or what your thoughts on this maneuver are!  Doesn’t that actually reduce Yahoo’s perceived value as a search engine, having results served up by the competition?  Wouldn’t that also drive down the stock price, making it even easier for Microsoft to be able to pick it up?

So I was snooping aroiund YouTube to see what information I could find about Windows 7, when I came across this video of Construction Mike managing his day to day with a myriad of various informational and communication devices, all apparently loaded up with Windows 7.

 While I found most of the devices to be soooooo cool and I want them, I have difficulty actually imagining people from most industries, let alone the construction industry, investing in the number of gadgets per employee that Mike had the good fortune to use in his daily routine.

…and now here it is for everyone to see!

Leading digital world measuring company, comScore, Inc. released a report today announcing the major trends in U.S. Internet activity last year.  A great article on CNNMoney.com actually goes into some really good detail on who the top-gaining properties were for the year as well as site categories, and core search market growth.

All around good guy and internet marketing guru Matt McGee today announced the launch of the SEMMYs … the search industry’s equivalent of the EMMY’s.

The EMMYs are described as; an annual awards event honoring some of the best articles and blog posts from the search marketing industry, as voted by the industry. We have 127 authors nominated, representing 111 blogs/sites.

There are 15 categories for awards:

• SEO
• PPC
• Small Business
• Local Search
• Google
• Blogs & Blogging
• Link Building
• Social Media

While most of us were at Pubcon last week, Google put on a by invitation only Local Symposium. This meeting was to go over Google’s rules and best practices, and to discuss some of its ongoing efforts with call reporting, mobile ads, printable coupons and website analytics.

Peter Krasilovsky reported that while it was “not very revealing”, it was “pretty helpful”. He went on to provide the best synopsis of the event I could find:

Well, week 1 of the SEO Lyrics Contest has been a resounding success. We’ve received 19 entries to date, which is suprising given it takes time to put pen to paper and construct a song. Voting has been brisk also. Most surprising however, is the quality of the lyrics being submitted … nothing less than spectacular! Any number of these submissions could be classified as an industry anthem.

Something we would like to see yet are some submissions by the search engines or social media themselves. While many of us in the SEM community write about rankings, I’m certain the other perspective would sing a different song so to speak.

What a day for the SEO Lyrics Contest. The contest is beginning to get some really good traction, resulting in 10 new song entries for the day. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but wow, there are some really good creative minds out there in the search space.

For those of you submitting, please do remember to include a link to your site. We want to drive as many links and as much traffic to your site as possible. You deserve it!

Without further ado, here the 10 submissions for Thursday May 24th: