Click To Hit

So finaly there seems to be some progress on the long rumored Time Warner / AOL sale. Tonight MSNBC reports that Microsoft (similar to Yahoo) at least for now has been pushed to the backburner while talks with Google have become much more serious.

The Google-AOL talks would expand on a relationship which analysts estimate account for 2 percent to 4 percent of Google’s revenue on a net basis. AOL uses Google’s search engine, and Microsoft had been negotiating to get AOL to use its search technology instead.

Microsoft has been rightfully eager to displace Google and get their hands on that prime percentage as the online ad wars starts to really heat up amongst these highly tunes search competitors. I'll be curious to see whether not wanting to rock the boat with the current relationship will win over MS who has seemingly bottomless pockets and based on recent aggressive moves into the online ad space seems pretty dedicated to spend their way to the top.

Quite the amazing announcement and something I'm really keen to work with the new crew from Critical Path on. Now's the time to roll up the sleeves and prove to both our new and existing customers just how committed we are to ensuring we exceed all of their expectations of what an outsourced Email provider should be.

Tucows expects no disruption in service for existing hosted messaging customers. Tucows will assume full management of the hosted messaging infrastructure and continue to run current data center operations in Denver, Colorado and London England. In addition, Tucows will hire the majority of Critical Path's hosted operations and support teams.

It may take a little time for the dust to settle, but I think Tucows rock solid history as a premium supplier will provide a sense of confidence that their messaging service will not only be unaffected by this move and stable going forward, but a soon to be even greater value than what they receive today.

Hopefully this announcement explains some of the reasons why I haven't expanded on a few of the changes to my role here until now. I'll still be working closely with Blogware and Blogware customers, but I'm also excited to be working closely with the new team from CP in the transition for some of our important new messaging clients. 

There are a few other changes to my role that I'll expand on another day, but I can feel that 2006 will be a very busy and exciting new year.

Now this is a very interesting move by Amazon's parent Alexa. They're effectively renting out their search technology to anyone interested in mining 5 billion documents using a proven and robust search infrastructure without having to invest in building it first.

Imagine: you have the next great idea for search… What do you need to get off the ground? The first and perhaps most difficult and expensive piece of the puzzle is a good Web crawl. Your crawl will need to access a high-speed internet connection, it will need to pull down thousands of pages per second. It will need to manage thousands of connections and process pages to extract links. Then you will need to store hundreds of terabytes of data. And that doesn't even begin to tackle the rest of the equation: processing the documents, indexing, storing the index, serving it, and keeping it updated. You are going to need millions of dollars in technology and staff and at least a year to get things rolling.

Well, I don't know if that last sentence is entirely accurate, speaking from experience and even though it was more of a directory you can build something pretty darn impressive for less than a quarter million.  

Either way if you're interested in becoming the next Yahoo on a shoe string or need to index a few billion pages the day before your school project is due you can check out the site here and the pricing here.

It's great to see initiatives announced to standardize some of the concepts in structured blogging. Although the plugins for wordpress and moveabletype are pretty far from being accessible, easy, or intuitive enough for the masses, it's definitely a great first step and hopefully will get the ball rolling nicely.

“A new era in blogging is upon us. We're expanding the ways we create, share and syndicate content — and we want to make sure that all the emerging standards are inter-operable,” said Salim Ismail, Co-Founder of PubSub Concepts, a leader of the initiative.

I've mentioned may times on this blog that I feel the successes of podcasting and even blogging in general can be directly attributed to the standardization of RSS, and structured blogging IMHO is definitely the next evolution of RSS as a communication medium.

After spending the last week on holidays and the week before that preparing for a bit of a change in my role here at Tucows, I'm finally back, fully recharged, and raring to go.

More on the exciting changes once the dust settles a bit more, but in the meantime everything's back to normal with a ton of emails to catch up on as always after disconnecting for a while.

I'll have more time to post some thoughts on a few topics I've been tracking once I play the “catch up” game, so thanks in advance for the patience if I owe you an email or a phone call, I'll be there soon.