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.

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.

Well, the brilliant minds at Google have developed what the IT and media crowds are pegging as the next big thing – “Google Wave”.

A few people have described it as “turning email on its head” and Google spokespeople describe it as E-mail developed for the users of today-rather than 40 years ago (when email was first developed).

So let’s take a look at what Google Wave is all about!

A wave – in essence – is always moving, ever changing and never still; it is truly dynamic. What Google has done is to turn emails, which are considered ‘static’, into something that’s more dynamic.

For all intents and purposes Wave is a glorified IM/Chat program (such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger and AIM). The major difference being that it mixes IM & chat with emails, and has potential for rich media such as large file videos/pictures and the ability to communicate with new ‘fads’ such as downloading and updating one’s twitter status’.

Here’s an example of how the whole ‘Wave’ process works. Here’s a brief example of how it can work for you [from Mack Collier’s website “The Viral Garden”].

“I can create a Wave that’s 5 paragraphs, and send it to Beth. Beth can then go in and break up the Wave and reply to each paragraph. I can then reply to each point Beth made.

Now let’s say at this point we decide that we want to bring Amy and Jason into our Wave and get their ideas on what we’ve been talking about. First, they are going to see a Wave that’s probably confusing as hell, because it will be my original 5-paragraph Wave, which was then broken into 5 parts (where Beth replied to each paragraph), and then I replied to each of Beth’s replies. So it looks like a complete cluster to anyone that joins the Wave at this point.

But Google Wave would give Amy and Jason the ability to ‘replay’ the wave and see how it was created. They could first see the 5-paragraph wave I wrote, then see Beth break it down into replies for each paragraph, them my replies to her replies. So it’s less confusing”

Source: http://moblogsmoproblems.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-first-date-with-google-wave.html

One hundred thousand (that’s 100,000) public invites were sent out on 30^th September this year and don’t worry too much if you weren’t one of those lucky ones. You can sign up with this link below or wait for someone to contact you/wait for the wave to reach you eventually!

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignup/

Both Google’s press release information and the experience of beta users reveal a lot of excitement but in varied cases it seems to be a lot of hype about something we can potentially (and currently) do without. It is however an application that may become a standard amongst other e-mail providers such as Live hotmail and Yahoo Mail – so that’s where the value lies. However unless there are a few improvements between now and the launch date, I will stick with the old, static, snail (e)mail.