With the flurry of news stories running rampant over the past 24-48 hours, poor Scarlett Yahoo must be exhausted. Who indeed to take to the cotillion? There’s that awful Rhett MSN or that nice Ashley Wilkes Google.

Frankly, I’m reminded of the opening scene with Scarlett on the veranda cloying with prospective suitors and the saga is all a little exhausting. Makes me want for a nice Mint Julip and a nap until this whole silly thing blows over

Afterall, tomorrow is just another trading day.

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?

According to a bi-annual report from Nielsen Mobile found that 58 million, or 23%, of all U.S. mobile phones users, have viewed mobile advertising in the last 1 month. Of these, 28 million subscribers say they responded to the ad in one way or another.

The findings are based on a study of over 22,000 mobile users, carried out in the last quarter of 2007. Overall there was a big jump in the number of users who recalled seeing mobile advertising, up 38 percent from the last report. In the second quarter of 2007, Nielsen reported 42 million subscribers saw mobile ads, while the number rose to 58 million for the fourth quarter.

A very good friend of mine, and senior executive with Google, suggested to me today that the search giant is imminently poised to begin consolidating the search engine optimization industry. Google plans to make SEO services available to web site owners and marketers directly, to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective, for free.

…and then progress dictated that all things need to be accessible online, so Microsoft (MSFT) created Office Live - a suite of services for small businesses.

Image courtesy www.di.net

Now unlike what the name suggests, this is NOT an online version of Microsoft’s suite of office software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc, but instead some various services being provided by Microsoft.  Services such as Contact Manager, Document Manager, Workspaces and Project Manager.

Contact Manager allows you to do such things as provide a single view of customers and prospective customers, track contact with customers, check account status and sales opportunities from any location with a Web browser, and send automated “triggered” emails specific to various events such as new sales leads, etc.

So how many of you are familiar with Enterprise tools such as Google Search Appliance? Google Mini Search Appliance for example, starts at $2,990 for searching up to 50,000 documents with a 300,000 max document capacity. Google Search Appliance starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents with a 30 million max document capacity. (By the way, these are tools used for internal development of infrastructure and intranet and to enable maximum efficiencies between the internal world of information and the internet, among other things, for those of you wondering.)

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.

Oh, I love this. The deluge of "news" articles about Google’s re-release of JotSpot as Google Sites has only just begun and already everyone and their mother has an opinion that needs to be shared.

Which is great — I’m not one to lobby for blogging to then slam it. In fact, as soon as I heard about the release (Twitter, anyone?) I wanted to write about it all SEO expert style, you know? How Google Sites will increase the number of sites on the web (duh!). Or how down the line Google could include automated optimization reports for Google Sites the way they’re toying around for AdSense.

Last week I lost a bet to my friend Paul Steven over at North South Media. While I was a fan of their blog, it wasn’t until I ran into Paul on StumbleUpon that I got to know more about him and his company. Among a common passion for SEO, I discovered that we both share more than a passing interest in the worlds “beautiful game” - soccer or Football as it’s known across the pond.

As first times go, everyone remembers theirs. My first encounter with a social media site was with Flickr. Seeing as this was my first, I’m not sure why I took so long to write about it in this series, other than to say that, from an SEO perspective, Flickr is not as sexy as StumbleUpon, Digg et all.

This week I take a look at Flickr, by the numbers.

The History: