Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! on Friday, which could make both companies a slightly more competitive against Google than they currently are. While combining the two companies in any capacity would certainly shake things up a bit, chances are that it wouldn’t have a significant impact initially, because collectively, they would still only hold a little less than 30% of the market share, while Google dominates with over 65%.

It’s recently come to my attention that Network Solutions is engaging is some pretty unethical business practice, and they’re using your time and work to profit from it! It works like this. You visit Network Solutions to see if a domain name that you’re interested in buying is available, and as luck would have it, the name you want is. So you’re about to register it but you then find out that there are companies like Go Daddy who offer the exact same product at about one third of the price, so you hop over to their website to buy the domain, only to find out that it’s no longer available. Why? Because when you entered the domain search at Network Solutions, they registered it for themselves so that you would be forced to buy it from them rather than another, more ethical domain registrar.

You may ask yourself why a company would resort to these types of extortion tactics. The answer is quite simple - they are selling the same exact thing as their competitors at three times the price. Congratulations Network Solutions, you’ve won the dirtiest registrar ever award!

Here is a rather extensive list of web 2.0 links. Some of these applications or services can be used to help grow your business, some can be used to make daily tasks easier and some, well, some are just useless.

If you’re trying to get up to speed on HTML in a hurry, a few hours on HTML playground will definitely help to get you there. It lets you learn by doing, and it’s also is a great reference source for those of you that already have the basics down pat.

Need a quick way to help choose effective color combinations? Check out Adobe’s newest tool, Kule. For the particularly color-challenged, you can use it for all sorts of color related decisions in your life,?like choosing the right tie, paint or drapes.

The Justice Department has ruled that Google’s complaint regarding the default settings for the search box in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7?do not violate their antitrust agreement with federal and state governments. Google claimed that the default settings in Internet Explorer favoring MSN Search would give Microsoft an unfair advantage. Ironically, this is exactly what Firefox?does for Google in their browser’s search box.

We’ve been using the beta version of IE7 here for a while, and while it offers a lot of features that none of the other browsers out there offer, the current beta does not live up to the reputation that Microsoft execs have built up for it?? especially in terms of it’s utilization of RSS. The new browser has made up for a lot of previous shortcomings, but I’m a bit disappointed in the way that RSS ended up being implemented. It seems to be more of an afterthought than anything.

Yahoo recently released AlltheWeb LiveSearch, a tool that dynamically generates search results as well as additional key word phrases that might match the query as it’s being typed.

In my opinion, this seems like a great resource for anyone conducting research, especially if it’s on a subject that they may not be very familiar with.

An estimated 68% of active internet users in the U.S. had access to broadband as of February, according to a recent study from Nielsen/NetRatings. This is up 28% from 74.3 million in February 2005 to 95.5 million this February.

What this means to businesses is that you can deploy a more powerful web site that includes streaming audio/video, larger images and more interactivity with less concern over bandwidth restraints. It does not mean that you should add all sorts of bells and whistles just for the sake of adding them. A good rule of thumb is to only add new features that improve a visitor’s experience on your web site in some way. Other considerations on this subject are that you will still need to follow the same usability guidelines, ensure that your web site is able to be crawled and indexed by the major search engines, and should still offer a low-bandwidth version of your web site for those visitors who are still using dial-up.

What are your marketing decisions based on? Most small businesses and even quite a few large ones make these types of decisions with little more than a “feeling” or “intuition” to go on. While you may have been in your industry long enough to know what works and what doesn’t, when it comes to your marketing, you really need to have some solid data to base your decisions on. In order to do that you need to have some sort of system in place to acquire that data.

There are quite a few good data base programs available that are well within the price range ( from free to just a few hundred dollars ) of just about any business. ACT, Goldmine and eGroupWare are all choices that are inexpensive, effective and customizable. For larger businesses, you may want to consider having a custom application developed from the ground up. The important thing is to accurately track your interaction with prospects and clients so that you can determine which of your marketing efforts have been successful and to what degree. As the amount of data that you have access to grows you will be able to more finely tune your marketing efforts and generate a higher ROI.

If you want an example of a company that is acquiring and utilizing their data to the fullest extent, look at Google. Aside from the information in their 2003 patent which was made public in 2005, you can find further evidence of their use and planned use of data in a document released during their recent analyst day.

If you take the steps to collect and utilize the data associated with your marketing efforts, you will out perform your competitors and increase your business.