Blogging

Here is a summary of the week’s Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.

Easily the biggest tech story of the past two weeks has been Microsoft’s unsolicited $44 billion takeover bid for Yahoo!.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we’ve written about how the merger would ultimately be a good thing for users. We wrote about the effect the acquisition might have on OpenID. We wondered if Google had made a mistake to go hostile about the proposed merger. We suggested a plan B for Microsoft. We wrote about how publishers would fare under Microhoo. And when a rumor surfaced this week that perhaps Microsoft was considering buying Facebook instead of Yahoo!, we wrote about why we thought that was actually a good idea.

We’ve currently running an ‘open thread’ post asking: how would you fix Yahoo!? Would you take Microsoft’s offer? Hold out for more money? Or explore one of the other options? Or do you have a completely new idea that no one has talked about yet? Let us know in the comments below, and remember that the best daily comment on RWW (as chosen by our editors) wins a $30 Amazon gift card.

Web Trends

Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It’s one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. We’ve been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so we wrote up some quick pros and cons of the options. We invite you to add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

R.E.M. Releases New Videos Under Open Source License

R.E.M. this week released 11 videos for the first song from their forthcoming album, all in MP4 format in HD and under an open source license. “Supernatural Serious,” is the first single from the band’s next album, “Accelerate,” due to be released April 1st.

Viewers are encouraged to remix the videos and share them on the song’s YouTube page. The band will not be doing a Radiohead and offering the album for free, but this is an interesting twist somewhere in between that approach and the standard industry practice.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

Web Products

Delver Reinvents Search

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 8:39 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.