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.

One of my favorites and one which I wish I was more diligent about is “Delete Unwanted Posts From Your Wall”.  If we are truly judged by the company we keep, it’s important to realize that your coworkers and managers may not be pleased to see some of the more outlandish entries some Facebook users seem to post.

If you are like most people, your Facebook friends list contains real (non-cyber) friends, family, coworkers and potentially even others.  The chances that some of them may post material which could offend someone else are high, so keep an eye out for the random comment which could reflect badly on you, fairly or not.

I have a friend I’ve spent a limited amount of time with who occasionally posts comments about her love life which by most people’s sensibilities would be considered crude.  The two times (so far) I’ve seen them I’ve remarked to others “I can’t believe she just posted that!”, but I did not think to delete the entries entirely from my wall.  I need, we all need, to consider the fact that others will view my wall and potentially make a judgement about me based on her crudity.

The Wired wiki has really just begun, and they are solicting entries, so if you think you have something valuable to add, we encourage you to help build up this body of knowledge.

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.

Here’s the official post with instructions…

Monkee-Boy Social Media Commentary: While this integration presents a great opportunity to enhance the business value of your social presence (for us we can easily share screen-shots of new designs and approved customer success metrics with our tweets), it also presents an equal opportunity to look foolish and harm your reputation.  Remember, the next time you have one drink too many at a professional function, the pictures could be re-tweeted to your colleagues dozens of times before your headache subsides.

Hey, I’m just sayin’….