The only time of year when advertising receives as much hype as a sporting event means ad agencies kick it up a notch. So how do you think they did?

Coming up fast (February 19-21) is the 2008 Search Engine Strategies show in London.
 

Boing Boing is out with a post this morning, "Some Flickr users wary of a MSFT takeover."

I’m surprised that even Kara Swisher has missed this. The bloggers are going nuts, once again, over the email that a Google lawyer sent to Microsoft regarding Microsoft’s proposed purchase of Yahoo.

Here’s what’s really going on:

Onlookers have to wonder whether Microsoft will succeed in its attempted takeover of Yahoo.  There are also the market shares of Vista and Internet Explorer to consider.  Still, the latest news involves game consoles, and on that front, Electronic Arts predicts that the Playstation 3, and not Microsoft’s Xbox 360, will win in 2008.

The turnkey platform offered by Mochila takes content distribution and ad serving, and puts it into an easy to add package for publishers.

Some Pennsylvania bureaucrats have lost their minds, probably somewhere in the stack of papers their shuffling, after noticing how much money the state was losing by not enforcing an arcane law established long before anybody ever heard of eBay.

Web search at the four major search engines does not provide a way to sort results by date.

The Arlington County Police Department in Virginia is using YouTube to help catch criminals.

Surveillance video from crime scenes is being uploaded to the Web site in an effort to receive leads and identify suspects. A two- minute video of a bank robbery received more than 1,000 hits and could be responsible for providing a lead in the case.

If this change didn’t take place, the average computer user would eventually notice; if nothing else, as we run out of Internet addresses, it seems like new corporations would wind up with some pretty odd websites.  The conversion to IP version 6 is starting, though, and it should prevent those problems.

Microsoft, in its conference call Friday regarding the Yahoo offer, said that “We love the Yahoo brand”, when asked about what would happen to MSN and Windows Live.

YouTube’s recent entry into the Korean market has failed to have a strong impact there.

The number of daily visitors to YouTube English and YouTube Korean sites reached 382,000 on January 23, the day it launched according to Rankey. Com, an online traffic-monitoring firm. The numbers began to dwindle the following day and dropped to 115,000 on January 31.

I made quite a few videos on Qik last week while at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Here’s my favorites, not necessarily in order of importance. I marked the must watch videos.

The corporation that caused 1,000 yawns has delivered all sorts of surprises as of late.  First was the whole we-want-to-acquire-Yahoo thing.  Now Microsoft is (sort of) releasing Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista.

I can remember several episodes from my life in which I was at the emergency room with my wife, son, or daughter, while family members waited anxiously for word. At other times, I was on the waiting end, pacing and wondering exactly what was going on.

YAHOO! MUSIC SHIFTS GEARS

One of the things that social media is great at is soliciting and distributing user-generated video. 

Like eating fruits and vegetables or building lighter cars, open-source technology seemed like the sort of good idea that would always go ignored.  But according to Gartner, elements of open-source technology will be present in 80 percent of all commercial software by the year 2012.

RDF, the production company for Fox’s "Don’t Forget the Lyrics" and A&E’s "The Two Coreys" is creating online and mobile games for the two series.

As the news about Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! went around, the search engine industry was inundated with the buzz and speculations.

While the big deal in the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo is the money and market share changing hands, there are plenty of Microsofties who are wondering which Yahoo employees will become their co-workers, their bosses, and their replacements.

Given the hue and cry about Yahoo!’s expected layoffs and its less than perfect market performance in Q4, the word about the possible bid by Microsoft had already been in the air, which has now been translated in to a reality. Would the deal eventually materialize or not?