The International Herald Tribune reports that companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are buying once-obscure online advertising firms for eye-popping prices. The issue reached new heights May 18 when Microsoft agreed to pay $US 6 billion for the online advertising company aQuantive. It was Microsoft’s largest acquisition, and a sign of its desire to build an Internet advertising business.

Earlier, Google agreed to buy DoubleClick, a competitor of aQuantive, for $US 3.1 billion, outbidding Microsoft. Since then, all of Google’s main competitors have bought online advertising specialists. Source: http://www.iht.com:80/articles/2007/05/20/news/msft.php

The Guardian of 21 May 2007 reports that British technology group SpinVox has signed a deal with US blogging company Six Apart to offer speech-to-text technology to its LiveJournal service. About 12 million bloggers use LiveJournal. SpinVox’s co-founder and chief executive Christina Domecq said mobile phones were an obvious tool for bloggers. But typing on a phone’s tiny keyboard was hard work. The new Spin My Blog technology converts speech to text. SpinVox already offers voicemail-to-text and speech-to-text message services.

I started this blog because I was unhappy with what Telstra did to my Bigblog. Telstra placed advertisements on the site without my permission, changed the appearance and generally made it unattractive. So I have gone here, where I have more control over my site.