Is Skype up for sale? Is Google the likely buyer? Or Rupert Murdoch, who almost bought it last week for $3 billion?…
Growing speculation and some rumours in the past few days. Robert Scoble links to a few discussions. Stuart Henshall in Skype Journal links to a few more. Meanwhile, Skype continues looking after its users with another SkypeOut Gift Day today and a reduction in SkypeOut call costs to over 30 countries.
> You can now filter keyword searches on Technorati by languages other than English. Now, you can search for blog posts in the top 10 languages Technorati sees in the blogosphere right now (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and All). More to come as Technorati sees them appear in the blogosphere. More Technorati news – a special version for handhelds and mobile phones. If you’ve got a web-enabled mobile device, just visit m.technorati.com for a Technorati experience designed especially for small screens.
> Charlene Li on Yahoo’s recent purchase of Konfabulator: “This is where I think Yahoo! gets very, very interesting with Konfabulator. As a developer tool, it may have some interesting potential for developing neat interfaces into Yahoo!’s vast stores of content and information. But if Yahoo! can put the power of widget creation into the hands of end-users, it would give us end users the power to not only create custom content streams a la RSS and MyYahoo!, but also allow us to filter, distribute, and combine that data in any way we see fit.[…] Proposed RSS extensions from Microsoft, Yahoo, etc, will provide additional structure around which widgets can be built – think shopping alerts.
> Blogging is booming in the UK, according to Netimperative quoting research data from monitoring firm Hitwise: Visits to blogs in the UK currently account for almost 1 in 200 visits to all websites, representing a huge 130% increase on last year. Hitwise figures showed that MSN Spaces and LiveJournal dominated the market. Myspace is rapidly gaining in popularity, with a 500% increase since it debuted in the Hitwise ranks in September 2004. Currently the fourth biggest blogging site in the UK, Hitwise says that Myspace has seen a particularly sharp surge in traffic over the last six months as word-of-mouth popularity has spread, causing it to become the 25th most visited destination in the UK in June.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
