Is it news if nothing's happened? That's the question I found myself asking this morning as I ran through my RSS feeds.

Yesterday I posted about some tech industry gossip, but was careful to qualify the information as purely unsubstantiated rumor. It's not as if I actually called Bill Gates' publicist to confirm he had cancelled his Facebook account, and I didn't IM Larry and Sergei to confirm whether or not they had bought Bebo. As it turned out, the Bebo acquisition rumor was quashed by the end of the day, and tech columnists went back to speculating about who bought Plaxo.

But the biggest non-story of them all, the one that has generated more speculation than Brangelina's pregnancy, is the ongoing saga of the Yahoo! fire-sale. The only thing that has actually happened so far is Microsoft officially issued an offer, and Yahoo! officially turned it down. Since then there have been rumors that Yahoo! has been talking to Google, and more recently News Corp. about possible alternative deals. Obviously Yahoo!'s shareholders are the ones who are most interested in how this plays out, so Jerry Yang has sent them a letter explaining why they turned down Microsoft's offer. But how much of this news is actually worth paying attention to, since no transaction has actually occurred?

Which brings me back to my original question: is it really news if nothing has actually happened, or is it just gossip? To get to the root of the question, I just had to ask myself who actually benefits from this endless back-and-forth speculation. The answer, is pretty obvious: the publishers who are generating ad revenue from all those page views! Every entertainment publisher knows that nothing generates a good buzz like a little celebrity gossip, and in the tech industry that model seems to apply equally well. So the answer seems to be that it doesn't really matter whether it's truth or rumor, just as long as people are eating it up.

Well well well. Microsoft has made a play for Yahoo! In an offer worth $44.6 BILLION dollars, the ball is in Yahoo!'s court to either reject (which the have done before) or accept (which would totally suck for the software freedom movement). But the funny thing is, Google is being referred to as the "borg" and a monopoly that needs to be challeged. I just don't get people sometimes. Only a few years ago Google were the rebel forces. Now we're positioning Microsoft as the underdog. Crazy.

Well, at least some people have a sense of humor about it.

After days of rumours, the announcement was finally made yesterday: Microsoft has just paid $240 million USD for 1.6 percent of social-networking juggernaut Facebook, which makes Facebook worth $15 billion dollars. This makes Facebook the 5th most valuable US Internet company (Google is #1, followed by eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon).

Google was apparently also in the running for a piece of Facebook, and there is plenty of speculation going around as to why they were snubbed in favour of Microsoft. The simple reason is of course, that Microsoft had already invested significantly in the social-network startup when they bought the exclusive rights to sell FB's advertising inventory, and they had already agreed to work together on future technology and advertising initiatives.

After days of rumours, the announcement was finally made yesterday: Microsoft has just paid $240 million USD for 1.6 percent of social-networking juggernaut Facebook, which makes Facebook worth $15 billion dollars. This makes Facebook the 5th most valuable US Internet company (Google is #1, followed by eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon).

Google was apparently also in the running for a piece of Facebook, and there is plenty of speculation going around as to why they were snubbed in favour of Microsoft. The simple reason is of course, that Microsoft had already invested significantly in the social-network startup when they bought the exclusive rights to sell FB's advertising inventory, and they had already agreed to work together on future technology and advertising initiatives.

This week Microsoft made a HUGE purchase, plonking down $6.1 billion for aQuantive, which includes Atlas, Drive Performance Media and Avenue A Razorfish. Following the initial public announcement, the following news bites have been posted over the past two days, highlighting just how rosy Microsoft feels about this deal:

From the New York Post:
"It is certainly a significant transaction and large in the context of what we have done historically, but we think entirely appropriate in terms of looking forward rather than backward," Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's chief advertising strategist, said on a conference call to discuss the deal.

From CNET News:
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Internet Conference, Microsoft Chief Advertising Strategist Yusuf Mehdi said the company does not necessarily need to acquire more scale in order to be a success. When asked whether there would be assets from Yahoo that could help Microsoft, Mehdi said, "From where we are today, I think we have all the pieces."

From ActiveWin.com:
"I would call the aQuantive acquisition more of a merger" than an acquisition, Berkowitz said. He said that he told Microsoft employees the same during an internal Town Meeting on the deal on May 18. Berkowitz characterized the aQuantive buy as an "additive." "It puts us in places where we weren’t before," he said.