So much for the idea of a second Second Life.  Lively, launched by Google this July, has already been deemed something of a failure, and the search giant's issued a notice that it will more or less kill the collection of virtual rooms at the end of December.

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Not unlike President-Elect Barack Obama's campaign for the Presidency, protestors fighting for gay rights are using the Internet as one of their biggest weapons in the battle for equality. More specifically, countless websites (and social network groups) have sprung up in support of gay rights. Sites like JoinTheImpact.com and MarriageEquality.org to name a couple.

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Yahoo has released the beta version of a new service called Yahoo Glue. What Yahoo Glue does is piece together results from different popular sites and bring them to you on one page. For example, a search for an NFL team will bring up results from Wikipedia, Yahoo Sports (including stats, rosters, schedules, etc), YouTube, Yahoo Maps, Yelp, Flickr, Yahoo Groups, and Yahoo Answers.

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Barry Schwartz posted something of a rant at Search Engine Roundtable after an unnamed blogger attacked the site's live blogging coverage of PubCon:

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After news came that Jerry Yang would be stepping down as Yahoo!'s CEO, the immediate reaction by analysts, Wall Street, and your neighbor's cat was: MICROSOFT ACQUISITION TIME!

But Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, is saying: Not so fast.

Ballmer has said time and again that Microsoft has moved on from the possibility of returning to the good ol' days of negotiating a Yahoo! acquisition.

And while it's tempting to think that he's just waiting for that stock to drop to around $2-3 a share (hey, only $6-7 more to go!), consider this: Yahoo's VP of Search Technology, Sean Suchter is leaving the Sunnyvale search engine. And I hope he likes rain and coffee, because rumor has it that he's headed to Microsoft.

That rumor was reported by none other than Kara Swisher, who is pretty much never wrong. The only thing I'm wondering is: Where's the noncompete agreement?

Amidst the rumors and denials, one thing is for sure. No matter how much Ballmer would like the speculation to end, it won't.

Flash content has long posed a lot of problems for the search and webmaster communities.  Now Google – and more specifically, the newly introduced Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash – intends to solve at least a few of them.

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eHarmony is releasing a new same-sex matching service starting by the end of March. This service is the product of legal problems the company has been dealing with out of New Jersey and California. A gay man in Jersey sued the company for not catering to same-sex relationships as a violation of his rights in the state of New Jersey, and earlier in the year, a gay woman from San Francisco filed a suit against the company for being denied access to eHarmony's service because of her sexuality.

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John Andrews highlights the fallacy of "make good content"

If we follow this “make good content” path eventually the search engines will fail to deliver meaningful search results, either because of the excessive noise or because they enjoy such a monopoly they find market exploitation irresistably more rewarding. At that point the White Hat SEOs won’t know what to do anymore, and the creators/artists will refuse to work for the nickels offered. The web will become the cesspool Google says it already is.

So much is lost in the attention whoring that is claimed to be professional SEO that less than 1 in 100 "professionals" understand the above and are willing to think it through to its end.

Using critical thinking skills does not make one a terrorist or a black hat individual. We are not the ones promoting infidelity (as Google has done for years).

Once the election smoke has cleared, Congress appears poised to pass Network Neutrality legislation. With promises from the Obama campaign about upholding neutrality principles, any remaining FCC opposition will be left standing out on a weak limb.

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