CNet looks at what plans Microsoft has now that it has lost the chance to partner with AOL.

Looks like “The Search” has turned up a bizarre technical problem, as the home page for BattelleMedia.com now pulls up a page titled RocknGo instead.

Microsoft must open up its code or face a 2 million ($2.4 million) a day in fines from the European Commission. The feud over this has been brewing for some time and it seems to be coming to a head. They’ve given Microsoft five weeks to comply.

Jews For Jesus, that [unprintable] religion, has sued Google to get the rights for jewsforjesus.blogspot.com away from a critic of theirs.

It only seems like the Google deal with AOL was the only thing the search advertising company did this week; this is a quick look at some news out of the Googleplex.

So you want me to buy something? Well, I’m already in the door and browsing down the aisles of your online store.

Sadly there were no tales of bad behavior at the home of WSJ.com correspondent Lee Gomes, who invited the heads of email teams from Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to dinner with the admonishment that bad behavior would not be tolerated.

This is why I said “give Six Apart a break” a few days ago. Turns out that Salesforce.com had an outage the other day too.

A Christian evangelical group known as Jews For Jesus filed suit against Google in federal district court claiming a blog hosted through Blogspot (a Google property) infringes on the group’s trademark.

Yahoo released the metrics for the Howard Stern celebration and the number came to over 4.4 million streams of live video on December 16th. Additionally, more than 214,000 watched the activities after his final day on terrestrial radio. This is the largest live entertainment webcast.

Rex Hammock doesn’t think the press release is dead, but he was amused that news of the Google-America Online deal had been well-communicated by the time Time Warner issued its press release:

Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, has been drawn into the coils of the Googleplex.

Former Feedster CTO Scott Johnson has a new mistress. Her name is Ookle. Less than a week after his sudden exodus from Feedster, Johnson and Australian IM buddy Michael Air (yes, he’s never met him in person) have set up Ookles.com, a stealth mode webpage with an information sign-up screen. And that’s it. Mum’s the word until at least January 31st.

The search crew at Yahoo has managed to work an Audio tab onto Yahoo’s front page, to allow users to begin their music or podcast search as soon as they hit the site.

Paul Colligan asks what Microsoft has done about podcasting.

Microsoft and Google have brought an end to their legal battles over Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, who has become famous for defecting to Google to helm their operations in China, and led to Microsoft suing to compel him to comply with his one-year non-compete agreement.

Last year I made several predctions that now seem ridiculously silly. But a few ideas were pretty close. I’ve got a feeling that 2006 will be a big year, and here are some of the reasons why:

When building web sites, ASP and PHP are very popular languages. Here’s my opinion on whether ASP or PHP is best.

Both ASP and PHP are languages used to build Dynamic Web sites that can interact with Databases and exchange information. ASP (Active Server Pages) is from Microsoft and is used with IIS (Internet Information Server) that runs on Microsoft Servers. PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is from Rasmus Lerdorf, who originally designed this parsing language which was later modified by different people. It runs on Unix and Linux servers and it also has an NT server version.

Rick Hallihan asks why Microsoft’s http://connect.microsoft.com/ site doesn’t have RSS?

Matt Brett has graciously posted a gorgeous vector version of the new standard feed icon that will be in the Mozilla and IE browsers.

Google’s Blogger.com has made available a new Firefox extension that allows surfers to automatically see what bloggers are saying about the page they are viewing. The extension works like an instant gossip machine keeping a running tally of who’s saying what about whom.

It’s a done deal, as Time Warner accepted the $1 billion bid from Google for a 5 percent stake in AOL, who had been poised to accept an offer from Microsoft before Google’s late push. Google gets its content provider, and AOL gets a spot in Google’s far-flung ad network.