Well, it’s (almost) official, the battle for search engine traffic, and it’s associated pattern-matching potential for advertisers, will be fought amongst two giants – Google and Microsoft.  There’s no ‘David’ here, just two ‘Goliaths’.  Hopefully, unlike those old Godzilla versus Mothra movies, we all won’t be running screaming from the two monsters as they duke it out.

As this article in Business Week points out, the big prize here is related to data mining the search habits of the users – trying to convince potential advertisers that you have special knowledge of what people are looking for and how best the advertisers can attract them to their sites.

As of today, Google owns roughly 65% of search engine traffic, and this deal effectively gives the remaining percentage to Microsoft to help boost it’s relatively new Bing search application. In the coming months we’ll all see what the net effect of this merger will be, but in general my hope is that the presence of two giants won’t preclude some other enterprising types to conceive and build a better mousetrap.

After all, when I first found Google and adopted it as my search engine of choice almost 10 years ago, it was merely the brainchild of a couple Stanford grad students, not the looming monolith of today. Google’s minimalistic interface, fast speed – and ultimately – search effectiveness won me over. Even in the face of their ascendance to major power broker, I’ve stayed with them because generally I find what I’m looking for.

Let’s hope this newly-defined battleground doesn’t turn us all into a screaming crowd fleeing as the monsters fight.

As the popularity of Facebook continues to boom, it’s inevitable that you will be connecting with – either by you asking or them asking you – coworkers and even your managers.  How you manage those relationships can make quite a bit of difference to you.

The folks over at Wired have started a wiki topic on the matter, and the initial posts are encouraging in the sense that they are reasonable and well-intentioned.  Some seem obvious at first, but may not to be to all.
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It’s the Social Media version of a Reese’s Peanut butter Cup. You know, “You got your Flickr in my Twitter.” “You got your tweet in my pics.”

In any event, you are going to be seeing a lot of http://flic.kr links on Twitter pretty soon. Through a nifty little Flickr-Twitter integration you can now link your Flickr and Twitter accounts and add a little eye candy to your 140 characters.

Through Flickr’s email upload, you can simultaneously upload an image to your Flickr account and Tweet it with a link. You can also tweet an image directly from your Flickr account.
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