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Sun ended the day up 78.9 percent to close at $8.89 a share. The last time Sun traded at such levels was back in September.

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Yahoo Finance)

Both Sun and IBM have a strong focus on creating industry standard platforms, with heavy investment in open source initiatives. Few companies of this size would be trusted to control such a large portion of the open source space, including Sun’s recent acquisition of the open source database MySQL, though IBM has established the ability to maintain the interests of the open source community separately from their businesses.

IBM fell 1.03 percent to end the day at $91.95 a share, while the broader markets advanced.

Some analysts issued support for such a deal.

Sun Microsystems shares soared Wednesday, as reports surfaced that the struggling hardware maker was in merger talks with IBM.

Although Sun’s stock got a jolt as reports circulated that the workstation and storage company was in merger talks with IBM, it did not return it to its 52-week high levels of $16.72 a share.

Jeff Goldberg, a senior analyst with financial research and consulting firm Celent, said in a statement:

The rumors that IBM is making a bid for Sun Microsystems might be causing waves, but after the storm, the market will find that the two companies align well in mission and technology.

Jim Bankoff, who once served as chief of programming at AOL, put the round together and will serve as chairman of the board at SportsBlog Nation, which boasts more than 150 blogs, each one dedicated to a different college or professional sports team.

A freshly minted blog network called SportsBlog Nation (or SB Nation, as it calls itself) has secured a round of funding in the “mid-seven figures,” Sports Business Journal reported Monday.

The funding round was led by Accel Partners, best known these days for having been an early investor in Facebook; partner Jim Breyer holds a minority stake in the Boston Celtics. Also contributing were Ted Leonsis, former AOL vice chairman and owner of the Washington Capitals; former Yahoo executives Dan Rosensweig and Jeff Weiner; football-player-turned-private-equity manager Brent Jones; investment bank Allen & Co.; and several executives from Providence Equity Partners, where Bankoff is an adviser.

The Washington, D.C.-based SportsBlog Nation has been in development for about a year, Sports Business Journal wrote.

“We expect the industry will remain the second largest exporter in the U.S. for 2008,” Scalise added.

Global sales of chips sank 9.8 percent in November, underscoring the impact the worldwide economic crisis is having on chipmakers, the Semiconductor Industry Association said Friday.

Memory chips are putting the biggest damper on growth. Excluding memory, there was a slower year-on-year decline of 4.8 percent to $17.3 billion from $18.2 billion, the SIA said. “The memory market, which has been under severe price pressure throughout the year, has seen sales decline significantly while many other product sectors have year-to-date sales above 2007 levels,” SIA President George Scalise said in a statement.

The San Jose, Calif.-based trade group said worldwide sales of semiconductors fell in November to $20.8 billion, a decline of 9.8 percent from November 2007 when sales were $23.1 billion.

Sales were down 7.2 percent from the $22.4 billion in October, according to the SIA.

For the first 11 months of 2008, sales were $232.7 billion, a slight increase of 0.2 percent from the first 11 months of 2007 when sales were $232.2 billion. And excluding memory products, year-to-date sales jumped 5.6 percent.

Micron Technology, the largest U.S. maker of memory chips, posted a net loss of $706 million last month due to an oversupply of memory. And Taiwan’s memory chip industry has been seeking rescue funds from the government because of deteriorating market conditions.

Josh Cohen, a business product manager at Google, announced the move Wednesday in a company blog:

The ads are intended to be tailored to news search terms, but the two aren’t always on the same page, so to speak. While the news search understood that “spring training” was related to baseball, for example, only one of the top three ads presented made that connection, as the example below illustrates.

Google has begun placing text ads beside Google News searches.

Faced with a much tougher economy, Google is working harder to make money off more of its properties. In recent months, it’s begun showing ads in Google Earth and Google Finance as well.

Google has extended its AdWords program to Google News searches, delivering text ads on the right side of the search results page, just as Google has long done with regular Web search results.

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Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET News)

In recent months we’ve been experimenting with a variety of different formats, like overlay ads on embedded videos from partners like the AP. We’ve always said that we’d unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike, and we’ll continue to look at ways to deliver ads that are relevant for users and good for publishers, too.

What’s really neat is that it also keeps track of mentioned names and places in each story, to show how much coverage that person or part of the world has received within the last 30 days.

Each item can be drilled down into a little further, which is where you can see a small one-paragraph summary and the two charts for the coverage of people and places. Each of these places and names also gets its own page that lists related news, which makes it a very topical experience. The information itself comes from Freebase, the Wikipedia-like open-database project.

Microsoft’s Live Labs team has just released a new way to track political discourse on the Web. Called Political Streams, the tool tracks news stories on both blogs and traditional-news sites, and ranks it based on velocity and overall coverage.

Political Streams tracks popular political headlines and tracks their mentions in both traditional media and blog sources.

See also: Memeorandum and Blogrunner.

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CNET Networks)

Political Streams is the first site of its kind from the Live Labs team. I expect that we’ll see additional “streams” pages for tech, world, sports, and celebrity news after the presidential election.

Much like Google’s recent Blog Search page efforts, Live Labs’ Political Streams also keeps track of a very important number–how long a story has continued to get play. This number stems from the first time it began getting tracked through the service’s crawling engine, which doesn’t necessarily dictate where it sits on the list of top stories.

One interesting thing I noticed is that the top stories on the blog side were less than half the age of those on the traditional-news side. That, of course, is bound to change, depending on the day’s news.

When you’re entering your personal information–phone numbers, instant-messaging nicknames, addresses, and your birthday–Google presents options for sharing with various people. For me, it presented checkboxes (unchecked by default) next to the Gmail lists I’ve set up.

Google's contact info page lets you share details only with particular people. (Click to enlarge.)

Google Profiles is hardly a Facebook crusher or a LinkedIn slayer, but it is getting gradually more elaborate, as Google builds it up. In October, user profiles became visible to search engines. In November came identity authentication and a mechanism to let people contact you without sharing your e-mail address.

One of my constant complaints with services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and now Yahoo Open Strategy is that it’s hard to sift the activity from my close contacts out from that of the ocean of second-tier people. If Google wants to make something bigger out of its Profiles work, a list of your close ties is invaluable data.

I could see some tighter integration with Gmail’s contacts function here. Google is revamping Gmail contacts (hurrah!), and using Google Profiles would be a great way to ease the constant pain of keeping your contact list up-to-date.

(Via Google Operating System.)

The feature shows as a “Contact info” tab; clicking on it shows whatever contact information you’ve entered and the note, “You are not sharing your contact information with anyone. Edit your profile to add contact info, and then choose who to share it with so that they always have the most up-to-date information.”

Here’s why this Profiles move is interesting: telling Google whom you entrust with your personal information is a good way of identifying the close members of your social circle–in other words, the strong links in your social graph.

It indicates whom gets your trust, whose e-mail you want to read first, the people with whom you’re staying in touch, and those likely with shared interests. Even better for Google, by labeling data as “family,” “co-workers,” and your own mailing-list groups, Google can discern subtler distinctions in your social-graph ties.

In another expansion of its Profiles site, Google has enabled people to share their contact information with selected contacts, a move that offers modest convenience for users of the service and valuable data to Google.

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Google)

The page also has two links for setting up groups for family or co-workers. Clicking either presents a list of your top Gmail contacts.

commentary (Credit:
Matt Asay)

To be globally competitive, the United States does need to inculcate high-tech training earlier in life for would-be developers, and companies like Red Hat have targeted youth as young as high-school age with training programs.

Technology keeps making its way into younger demographics, a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. I caught my 3-year-old trying to send “text messages, Daddy” the other day.

I make my living from software, so I’m not advocating that we dump it anytime soon. Rather, I’m just hoping (and parenting toward that hope) that my kids will grow up playing soccer rather than manipulating FIFA09 on their
Wii; that they’ll read Tolkien, Austen, and Dahl rather than Nick.com; and that they’ll text less and write more prose. We still need people who can do those things.

I guess I should teach her the difference between cordless and wireless.

Nick Carr wrote about this in his insightful “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article in The Atlantic, and took a barrage of criticism for it. But there’s some truth to the notion that the Internet’s immediacy makes us impatient with books or anything that doesn’t deliver information in soundbites and searches.

But I don’t want my kids immersed in technology too much, too soon. I was a literature major, and still prefer reading Dostoevsky to Ars Technica, much as I enjoy the latter. Technology can assist in learning, of course, including with literature, but I also feel that something is lost when our experience is intermediated by technology, because the rhythm of technology moves much faster than old-world academics and maturation.

He added he would be “surprised, if not disappointed,” if Yahoo does not name a CEO within the next 30 to 45 days.

Meanwhile, strong outside candidates have reportedly included former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, whose expertise with the carrier could have come in handy in righting Yahoo’s failed effort to win the Verizon search business. Sarin is reportedly no longer interested in the Yahoo CEO gig.

Yahoo announced on November 17 that its founder and CEO Jerry Yang would step down and resume the role of chief Yahoo once a new CEO was selected. In the meantime, Yahoo is nearing its two-month mark in its search.

“If she has gone through two rounds of full interviews with the board, it sends the signal that she is being given strong consideration,” Nosal said. “Rarely do boards go through a second round of full interviews, unless there is something significant they see there, whether it’s for an internal or external candidate.”

For Yahoo, naming Decker as CEO could potentially bode well for its efforts to quickly reignite talks with Microsoft, given that an outside hire would need time to analyze the different aspects of Yahoo’s businesses before holding discussions to potentially sell off parts of the company.

Although sources familiar with the search say there is no deadline for naming a CEO and that it’s hoped one could be selected by the end of the quarter, executive recruiters say there is an artificial deadline.

“A search of this magnitude you can never rush, but since it’s one of the most high-profile CEO searches, there are any number of people who have made it be known in, or outside, the U.S. that they are interested in the job. I would imagine that Yahoo would be into its second or even third round of interviews with a short list of candidates,” Nosal said.

Executive recruiter Jon Holman of the Holman Group noted that if a CEO is not found within a four-month period after launching a search, the process “begins to grow hair.”

And at least one influential Microsoft source noted that Decker is well regarded at the software giant, even though the companies weren’t able to strike a buyout, or partial deal for just the search business.

And an All Things Digital post Wednesday notes Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz is another serious contender for the post.

And, in executive recruiting circles, more than one in-depth interview with an internal candidate signals a strong contender, said David Nosal, CEO of executive recruiting firm Nosal Partners.

But one source familiar with the search noted: “She has always been a strong candidate.”

This post was updated at 1:39 p.m. PST with Yahoo declining to comment.

“If six months go by, you know that the board has seen a bunch of people and you begin to think that the board doesn’t know what it wants, or the board is looking for a Superman that doesn’t exist, or no one wants the job,” Holman said. “All those alternatives are bad. You don’t want the company to look like damaged goods.”

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Yahoo)

Decker has undergone two full rounds of in-depth interviews with Yahoo’s board, according to sources.

Yahoo declined to comment on Decker and the CEO search.

A number of industry players and major Yahoo investors had discounted Decker as a viable CEO candidate for the struggling Internet search pioneer, following Microsoft’s failed buyout bid of $33 a share for the company. Yahoo, which had traded at roughly $19 a share before the initial bid became public last January, closed Wednesday at $12.71 a share.

Yahoo may have fallen out of favor with Wall Street after the failed Microsoft buyout bid, but that doesn’t mean you can count Yahoo President Sue Decker out of the running for CEO, people familiar with executive search say.