The brinkmanship being played between Microsoft and the European Commission escalated as the world’s largest tech company responded to a Statement of Objections from the EC.

Much has been made of the new wave of web services, where a hosted application fulfills the needs of numerous users. When it goes wrong, though, the efficiency of the distributed system plummets.

Changes are afoot at Google’s Video service, with some tweaks and twists to the terms of service that hint tantalizingly at a payment-based download service.

Return-on-investment (ROI) is up and the waiting list for advertisers to join AdCenter has lengthened, causing search marketers to clamor for a quicker AdCenter rollout.

With the backing of Feedster co-founder and former Chief Technical Officer Scott Johnson, then Vice President of Sales and Marketing Chris Redlitz was promoted to president of the company on November 7th. By December 14th, Johnson was not only given his walking papers, but also was voted off the board of directors. Redlitz was voted onto the board in his place. Unlike when Redlitz was promoted to president, no press release was issued announcing the change.

After seeing several thousand news stories and blog posts about the $1 billion investment Google made in Time Warner’s AOL, Google has come out to address some of the more hotly-debated issues about the deal.

The folks at Ask Jeeves released their top searches list and it was a list of usual suspects. They broke the list down into top news stories, top celebrity searches, top pictures, top health, top entertainment and top sports. Unfortunately, my name didn’t appear anywhere in the listagain.

Nothing generates greater paranoia in small children than the notion of sleek little elves watching their every movement, monitoring all their behavior and determining whether that child has been naughty or nice. Perhaps now, at least for a little while, the tables are turned. This year, MindComet has secured OfficialSantaEmail.com.

Mark Fletcher, Bloglines founder, has been a part of the Ask Jeeves family since February. The service has seen growth, its attendant pains, and a makeover for the downtime plumber.

Displax developed by Edigma combines rear projection holographic screens with finger tracking to bring interactive storefront displays to retailers and various commercial applications.

Many investors are only interested in investing money into an enterprise for a limited amount of time.

Another day, another startup splashes online. All of the Silicon Valley insiders and the beautiful people on Memeorandum have been writing about Wink.com today, so we’ll add our two cents from the heart of the Bluegrass as well.

Three companies control the reprint rights to about 80 percent of the world’s song lyrics, or so says Warner Chappell’s Jay Morgenstern. If that’s the case, then it should be relatively easy to license the reprinting of those lyrics and avoid the Music Publisher Association’s threats to take action next year against websites that post song lyrics.

In 1996, in the movie Jerry McGuire, actor Cuba Gooding, Jr. made famous the phrase “Show Me the Money!” Ten years later, a variation of that command, now “Show Me the Data!” rings in conference rooms throughout the country.

Wall Street Journal: Seagate Technology has agreed to pay $1.9 billion in stock to buy rival Maxtor Corp.

Among the numerous lists and predictions making the pre-holiday rounds online comes another forecast of a bright and profitable market for online ads.

Pamela Parker of ClickZ interviewed a number of search marketers to gage they’re thoughts on how the new Google, AOL deal will impact the landscape.

There are three main aspects: the player, the file format, and the authoring tool/IDE. Flash games can be developed for websites, interactive TV, as well as handheld devices. There is no need to adopt multiple programming languages to build games.

John Battelle is on his third year predicting the upcoming year in search. Some snippets…

SiliconBeat points to Wink, a new search engine that allows you to search for “tagged” content.

Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal sponsored the 2005 Search Engine Blog Awards and recently announced the winners of the inaugural competition.

Reuters has an interesting report that Google is being sued for trademark infringement – nothing new there – but this time its for allowing a Blogger to use a trademark on a blog hosted by Google’s Blogspot service.