Rattleblog: Tales from the blogosphere

21-01-2008

by Damien Mulley

Is 2008 going to be Yahoo's year after all? Are optical drives dead as everything moves into the cloud?

Techcrunch reported during the weekend that Yahoo could be laying off up to 20 percent of its staff within weeks. If it happens it'll be a brutal shakeup of the former darling of internet search, which in the past few years was getting far too comfortable being in second or third place in the search market. Since Jerry Yang came back to the helm things are changing a bit.

Frank Gruber reports that Flickr, one of Yahoo's acquisitions, last week announced it is hosting the photographic archive of the Library of Congress and will use the massive and devoted Flickr community to tag and annotate all the photographs. It's certainly a win-win for both sides as Yahoo gets a lot of royalty-free images while the Library of Congress uses people power to catalogue all their photos.

Staying with Flickr, the Laughing Meme blog reports that the image site is now opening up more of the its backend so people can search for photos based on the location they were taken from, allowing other websites to use these photos based on geography. Tourism sites take note.

Yahoo also released a fully working web-based MP3 player that anyone can use on their own websites to play MP3s of their choosing. According to Searchengine Journal, the web player is simple to use and can be easily customised to fit into the colour schemes of any website. Yahoo hopes to make money from it by allowing people to start searches in Yahoo based on details of the music being played.

Meanwhile Matthew Ingram reports that Yahoo is finally integrating results from its Delicious social bookmarking service into Yahoo search results. Delicious has millions of websites tagged and annotated and it would make sense for Yahoo to use the recommendations of the crowd to give it an advantage in search now that more and more people know how to trick automated search rankings.

Engadget writes that Walmart has killed off its online video store due to poor sales. Despite that news though it looks like online storage is the business to be in these days with companies working in and around online storage technology being snapped up, such as XIV by IBM and Onaro by NetApp.

Hot on their heels, as reported by KD Murray, Sun snapped up mySQL for a whopping USD1 billion. MySQL powers millions of websites and webservices, again showing that databases and data are poised to be a key business segment for 2008.

With all this talk about cloud computing it might come as no surprise that last week Steve Jobs decided at Macworld that DVD and CD drives were dead. Did you not get the memo? Apple was the company that decided the floppy disk had to meet its maker and with the introduction of the super-thin MacBook Air, it seems there is no longer a place for CD/DVD drives. We really don't think Sony and their Blu-ray team will be happy about this pronouncement but it will certainly be a boon for the online storage providers or those that sell media online -- oh, like Apple! Thanks for tuning into Rattleblog.

Damien Mulley is an Irish blogger and works as a technical writer in Cork.