Computerworld speculates that Microsoft and Yahoo! may be teaming up to compete against Google in the search space.

Citing Microsoft employee Ian McAllister’s recent blog post, it certainly appears that Yahoo! could be an unnamed potential partner as MS and Yahoo! look to slow Google’s rapid expansion and rising market share. ComputerWorld also suggests that the partner, instead of Yahoo!, may be a major Internet Service Provider as the post notes.

I’ll copy Ian’s blog post, as it doesn’t appear to be something that would likely stick around for too long.

“Whoa! A Major Player Looks To Take Google Down A Peg

In a great example of how to leverage blog marketing, the New York Times reports on Amazon Connect which “allows authors to post messages directly to their readers on a wide variety of subjects…”

“…begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans – and to sell more books – with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company’s online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.”

Microsoft, Google, and Kai-Fu Lee have reached a settlement that all parties have agreed upon.

For those that may not know…

“Lee had worked at Microsoft since 2000 and helped develop its MSN Internet search technology, including desktop search software rivaling Google’s. Lee joined Google in July to lead the search engine’s expansion into China…”

Must be nice having two of the largest and most competitive companies in the world fighting over you.

Red Herring provides a great outline of Yahoo!’s attempt to gain publisher advertising market share from Google’s AdSense service with its Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN).

On a sidenote to this, I have heard direct reports from other publishers that YPN is providing a solid 200% revenue comparison, in some markets, compared to Google’s AdSense. Which, if this is accurate, is one sure-fire way to take market share pretty significantly away from Google, though at an obviously greater expense.

It’s nice to see competition for the independent (and maybe not-so-independent) publishers out there.

Thanks Cindy!

Gary Price has a phenomenal overview of Topix.net‘s achievements this year. I’m not even going to try and summarize it, as you should just go straight there to read it, but here are some bullet points.

• Acquisition of 75% of the company from three different news sources
• Announcing a deal with the New York Times
• Increased from 300,000 to 360,000 categories/channels
• Offering RSS feeds for each category/channel
• The addition of over 15,000 blogs

The list just goes on and on and on…

TheStreet.com reports that Ask Jeeves is preparing to increase staff by 20%, “expanding both its operations center and its corporate headquarters staff in order to compete more publicly with it’s larger colleagues in the search space.

“What we really want to do is grow share,” says Berkowitz, who has headed Ask Jeeves since 2001, in an interview. “A lot of stuff is going to be happening” next year.

As Wikipedia becomes larger and more widely accepted, now with an Alexa rank in the range of the top 30 websites on the Internet, it’s beginning to have an impact on people’s perception, accuracy, and donations strategies. All of which have been, for the most part, positive.

A recent study by Nature Magazine, shows that Wikipedia is actually fairly close in accuracy to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

A ZDNet blog post states that “The study found both had an equal number of what were called “serious errors,” while Wikipedia had somewhat more modest errors.”

Additionally, it seems that Wikipedia has recently begun a donations effort in order to continue operations as a free resource, and aims to be the PBS of the Web.