Doug's Blog

Apple is going to buy Yahoo! At least that’s what I tweeted earlier this month and tried to convince smart guys Dan Wallace and Tim Elliott Wednesday night after a few glasses of wine. BusinessWeek this week reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone. My take is Yahoo! would be a better fit for Apple because it competes with Cupertino on fewer levels than Microsoft.

Add to that all the rumors swirling around next week’s Apple product announcement. Assume for a second Apple releases a tablet and that, technologically, it’s an absolute knock out (that would require at least solving the battery life and user interface questions). In order for the tablet to succeed it also needs content, just as the iPod never succeeded until the iTunes Store was born. Yahoo! is essentially already a content company, one that has contracts with many other content companies. Google recently pulled Associated Press content from Google News. What if Yahoo! (i.e. Apple) became the exclusive online portal to AP content? There are already rumors Apple has worked out a deal with The New York Times, albeit not an exclusive one.

Some people say Apple is a technology company. But that discounts the fact that they’re already the largest music retailer in the country.

And then there’s advertising. Apple’s recent purchase of Quattro Wireless shows the company knows it needs to have a holistic approach to wireless, but it’s going to take more than some herbal healers for Apple to really compete against Google and AdMob. In might just take Apple getting into the search ad business in a big way; buying Yahoo! and it’s ad network would certainly be one way to do that.

Last but not least among the reasons the two companies are a good fit is the cloud. Apple has been struggling in cloud computing for a long time. When it relaunched the stagnant .Mac service as MobileMe it was with many hitches, and a year and a half later MobileMe still underwhelms. Google’s numerous cloud offerings all serve as additional points of advertising presence. Apple’s best bet could be to buy Yahoo!’s data centers and network infrastructure knowhow if it want to compete seriously in the cloud.

Nick Bilton at the Bits blog just put together this great chart showing where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! compete. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Nick?

The trailer for David Simon’s “Treme” is up and it only serves to heighten my excitement about the show. Too bad I don’t get HBO — I might just have to do something about that.

Are you feeling a little blasé this Monday? Shit got you down? Kick off your week the right way by installing the new Jason DeRusha Bobblehead on your Facebook profile.

Thanks to my colleague and artist-extraordinaire Gerardo Obieta for drawing Jason. I’d like to add a punching bag function to this, but that might hit a little too close to home for Jason.

Last night I dreamed of a better world where we could all watch “Jeopardy” whenever we wanted. I dreamed of a simpler time before The Clue Crew. It was a world where Jeopardy.com let us watch every episode of “Jeopardy” that has ever been made, and we could search them all by question, answer, category and off-hand comments Alex makes. And we never had to be bothered with an episode of “Kids Jeopardy,” “Teen Jeopardy,” “College Jeopardy,” or, the most terrible one of them all, “Celebrity Jeopardy.” In this world, there was a way to play along at home without annoying all your friends.

Make it happen, Merv Griffin. Make it happen, Merv.

(Full disclosure: I did not dream of “Jeopardy” last night, but doesn’t this sound like a great world to live in?)

This isn’t the first time I’ve attempted keeping a blog; several other version have lived at doughamlin.com since I registered it in 2002. Past versions are lost to posterity, and I’m OK with that.

The latest iteration of this blog is by any measure a patent failure: I launched it on June 1 last year and have a grand total of three posts (this one is the fourth, and I had a fifth, which I ended up taking down). This is entirely my fault, and I aim to change it. But I am asking for your suggestions on how I change it.

I recently started a link blog, where I comment on the best of what I find online — I modeled it after Kottke.org and Snarkmarket, and the links run the gamut of my personal and professional interests, which are many. (If you follow my Tumblr or Google Shared Items feeds, you’ve seen fewer links from me lately, as they’ve all been going on my new link blog instead.) I’ll share the link to this new blog soon, but I want to make sure it has enough content before letting it loose (I also want to make sure I’m disciplined enough to keep updating it).

One option I have is rolling my new link blog into this blog; this is probably the surest way to ensure regular and frequent posts on this blog. However this would also corrupt my original purpose for Doug’s Blog, which was to post longer, thoughtful posts about… well about whatever is on my mind.

I could also do nothing, and continue to post longer item here infrequently, with short, frequent updates at the link blog.

Or I could nuke (i.e. delete) this blog, which is what I’ve always done with my past blogs that I deemed failures.

I’m sure there are some compromises too, and I’d be happy to hear them.

So, I know I have at least one loyal reader, and I’d love to hear thoughts on what I should do.

Obrigado!