The main culprit drawing Murdoch’s ire is Google, which grabs the headlines and summaries from online news websites and blogs and ranks them on the Google News service. The print mogul’s complaint stems from the traffic Google generates on the back of content generated by media outlets.

As part of his battle against the world’s largest search company, Murdoch is attempting to broker a deal with Microsoft that would see News Corp content supplied exclusively to the software giant’s fledgling “Bing” search engine, as reported on TechCrunch and the Financial Times – though the latter is behind a pay-wall.

The idea behind the deal is News Corp would receive compensation for its content – something it does not receive from Google – and Microsoft would theoretically be able to drive up the traffic to its search offering with exclusive content.

Murdoch has voiced his displeasure with online search engines in the past, though things started coming to a head when he told Sky News – which he owns the controlling interest in – that the flagship titles in the News Corp stable would consider blocking Google once a paid subscription model was in place.

“I think we will, but that’s when we start charging,” he said. “We have it already with the Wall Street Journal. We have a wall, but it’s not right to the ceiling. You can get, usually, the first paragraph from any story – but if you’re not a paying subscriber to WSJ.com all you get is a paragraph and a subscription form.”

When the Australian-born tycoon first announced the plan to charge for access to News Corp’s titles online, the announcement was met with almost universal ridicule. Murdoch’s plan was to use the established model of the Wall Street Journal for other News Corp titles like News.com.au and its subsidiaries like The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun and The Times in London and a plethora of other titles under the company’s banner.

“Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting,” Murdoch said during News Corp’s fourth quarter earnings call.

“My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process. I am very concerned that they are setting a horrible precedent for other software platforms, and soon gatekeepers will start infesting the lives of every software developer.”

Creating a ‘middleman’ as Joe mentioned, is something that developers would quite easily get frustrated with. Instead of developers being able to fix it themselves, they have to work through a middleman (in this case Apple).

Rules, restrictions and a review process do not really make it a developer friendly medium to sell applications. Meanwhile the web is ‘still unrestricted and free’, if Apple made it difficult for one of the world’s biggest iPhone app developers, imagine what it would be like for all of the others? Hence why Joe Hewitt has decided to return to his roots as a web developer.

“I am returning to my roots as a web developer. In the long term, I would like to be able to say that I helped to make the web the best mobile platform available, rather than being part of the transition to a world where every developer must go through a middleman to get their software in the hands of users.”

The Facebook iPhone app (currently the most popular application in the history of the iPhone) has had some major bugs-namely one I noticed whilst using it myself. When users try to view a friend’s profile page, each users profile reads “User has no recent posts”.

FaceBook has responded in regards to this issue:

“this is the result of a backend Platform API issue, not the iPhone app. We are pushing a fix shortly.”

Joe Hewitt’s departure from Apple iPhone application development marks the first major boycott from Apple’s App store as a result of its approval process. The store has been surrounded by controversy about their inconsistent and arbitrary approval process for developer applications; with everyone from Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor to search giant Google getting caught in its web.

If boycotting Apple’s iPhone for application development becomes a trend it may create many opportunities for both Microsoft and Google to claim market share with their own mobile app platforms. For now however, it’s just one developer (albeit a fairly well-known one) leaving the world’s most popular mobile application development scene.

The mobile advertising pioneer is a Silicon Valley success story that emerged in 2006, when Omar Hamoui founded the company after being frustrated by a lack of ways to generate traffic for his mobile site, claiming it was too hard to engage users.

“I’ve been working in mobile for over seven years now. Before AdMob, I founded two separate mobile startups that never got significant traction. It was so frustrating to build what I knew was an incredible service only to find myself unable to distribute or monetize the product without a carrier or handset deal. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one. Talk to any veteran in mobile and they will tell you just how hard it was to get things done only a few years ago,” wrote Hamoui in a statement.

These days AdMob is serving targeted and personalized advertisements on the mobile web through the use of its mobile advertising platform. According to the company website, the network claims to have served over 125 billion impressions.

The acquisition is the fourth biggest publically-disclosed deal in Google’s history, at least if Wikipedia’s metrics can be trusted. Upstaging the AdMob deal in price tag is the landmark $3.3 billion (US $3.1 billion) the company paid for DoubleClick, plus the $1.8 billion (US $1.65 billion) shelled out for YouTube and the cool $1.08 billion (US $1 billion) paid for a 5% stake in America Online – more commonly known as AOL – back in 2005.

Word also leaked that Google is rumoured to be acquiring Gizmo5, which was swallowed up in the hype surrounding the AdMob deal. The search giant is allegedly writing a cheque for US $30 million for the VoIP startup, though no official confirmation has come through yet.

Thanks to Apple’s prodigious marketing of their iPhone smartphone, and the global financial crisis ushering people to reach for their pizza coupons rather than their dinner jackets, both iPhone and pizza sales have gone up spectacularly since the beginning of the financial crisis.

Domino’s Australia has made an ambitious first attempt to finally marry the two in a free iPhone app suitably named “Domino’s”. Make no mistake; this powerful little app can have hot, fresh pizza delivered to your door within half an hour.

I can just imagine the App Store tagline-  ”Hungry? There’s an app for that.”

The true beauty of this app is the level of customisation you’re allowed for your order; everything from half an’ half to a completely custom built pizza! And all with a butterfingers-friendly and deliciously smooth user interface.

It’s not without its marketing prowess either – turning the iPhone sideways renders a more complete photo of the pizza in question, adhering to the age old tactic of placing the product in the customers’ hands. You’re also given the opportunity to track your orders from point to point, mimicking the logistics tracking paradigm – which for some people functions as a way of building up a sometimes illogical anticipation for product delivery.

You can type in those all important coupon codes and even select their special deals; and of course choose delivery or pickup. It’s a truly twenty first century pizza ordering experience.

This app is one of the first of its kind in Australia. Domino’s major competitor Pizza Hut launched their own app in the US, and with the immanent release of their localised Australian Pizza Hut iPhone App, it could spell the end of the clumsy automated voice recognition their phone-order customers put up with today.

Judging by the broad fascination of Aussies with all things iPhone and all things pizza, I would suggest that it may well take off.

Services such as GeoCities offered the world a web as Tim Burners-Lee had designed it – all of a sudden anybody could stake their claim to their very own corner of the World Wide Web, without the need for in-depth technical know-how, and all for the cost of a dial up plan.

In a world predating Twitter, where the word blog was largely unknown and to own a dot-com was to merely buy into a corporate fad – Geocities gave a voice to those who were previously muted responders, forever blurring the lines between media producer and media consumer.

Within a few short years it became home to millions of tech-savvy users worldwide. It was a place to write down your thoughts, host useful and individualised information on topics of interest and upload countless scanned images, creating a loosely bound collage which peered into the lives of everyday people. It was your very own hyperlink to share with friends and family; and with enough effort – it became your own personal hangout online.

As the web entered into the 2000s and the first emergence of social media and media sharing began to gain popularity. It marked the beginning of the end for the now humbled free D-I-Y website. Services such as MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and blogger offered everything people wanted out of Geocities, with many times the user friendliness, and with the sole object of encouraging social interaction.

With the emergence of these outlets the web changed drastically. People are still uploading the same media, they still stake their claim to the World Wide Web, but this time it is distributed more liberally – and instead we began calling more than one place ‘home’. You’d write your thoughts on your blog, keep up appearances on MySpace, host your photos on Flickr and eventually upload your videos to YouTube and organise your social life on FaceBook. You would link them all together and create your own personal web within an infinitely larger network – not having been exposed to a single line of code.

But it’s all too easy to forget what sites like GeoCities had shown early internet users. Many a budding web designer sought their career after fumbling about the HTML which drove their GeoCities account; and many more went on to realise the internet as a medium to reach out and be heard; to connect and organise and arrange the social artefacts of our lives. So a sincere farewell to GeoCities – one of the most successful online amateur content communities and a thank you for guiding the evolution of the World Wide Web.

It came to my attention as I was feeding an addiction I’d like to call ‘JB disease’ that Australians are able to purchase media such as CDs and movies/concerts/TV shows at their whim, thanks to their availability and accessibility – which has skyrocketed in recent years.

To acquire your new favourite sitcom you could simply go down to your local store and purchase a shiny new copy, buy it online through stores such as iTunes, or download it through ‘other means’.

But the question is: which is actually the better option?

Currently prices on virtual stores such as iTunes sell the same season of Heroes for roughly $10 less. However, when you include costs such as an internet connection, computer upkeep, electricity and the potential for your hard drive failing or computer crashing, there is a lot more at stake than a cost of $60.

Furthermore, how long does it take us in Australia to download a whole season of a television show? A bare minimum of a few hours for most of us and possibly a month for those stuck on the old 56k modems (although if using 56k I’ll assume that you have bigger issues than fast broadband to deal with).

This is becoming a major issue in Australia – internet speeds are too slow. Some of us are still paying an exorbitant price for our internet and have a small ‘cap’ on your downloads for the month. (That is being currently being resolved with the federal government’s broadband scheme rolling out as this was being written).

However if you were to go online and order the same TV series (add postage and handling costs) or go to your local store to buy it on DVD, it may cost a few dollars more but the only other costs you have to deal with are just transportation to the store.

Having a tangible copy which includes extra features has many benefits that don’t just stop at the end credits. Your brand new copy of the TV series will not have to deal with crashing hard drives, internet bills, download speeds, download caps and the like. You can simply place your disc in the DVD or Blu-Ray tray; close it up and away you go.

The DVDs are there for whenever you want to watch them, on a machine that by now any movie-watching Australian would have in their living room – the now humble DVD player.

Until download speeds are one par with that which many countries in Asia (such as Korea and Japan) have access to, downloading a movie or TV series is not something many Australians will be doing for a while to come. It may be a while before my JB calling turns into an iTunes calling yet!