Filed under: Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software
Yahoo! buys MyBlogLog, Bix
Hey, big spender. Today Yahoo! shelled out for not one, but two companies: MyBlogLog, a social networking site for bloggers and their readers, and Bix, a social contest service. Neither purchase price has been announced, though rumors say $10 million for MyBlogLog. I'm a big fan of MyBlogLog, which allows people to build communities around their blogs and, through a tracking code snippet, also collects salient statistics like which links your visitors clicked on the most and where they came from. Bix I wasn't familiar with until today, but the concept is interesting: It allows anybody to create an online contest that their friends (or anyone) can enter for, say, cutest cat or best lip-sync video.TechCrunch has the scoop on the MyBlogLog acquisition, which I think makes perfect sense next to its social services Flickr and del.icio.us, and of course its search business. The New York Times has the details on Bix, which it says is is "trying to capitalize on two trends in popular culture: the fascination with TV shows like 'American Idol' and the explosion in user-generated online content, especially video." I'm not sure how well Bix fits in with Yahoo!'s current lineup, but if executed correctly it could be huge.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
