There’s been a lot of buzz this morning about a possible link-up between Nokia and Microsoft, a combination that Om Malik likens to a “desperate hookup.” I agree completely. It’s clear that Microsoft has blown any reasonable chance it had of gaining significant market share in smartphones. An agreement with Nokia won’t change that, and it won’t help Nokia, either. There is simply no room for another significant player in the smartphone space beyond Apple, Google (Android) and RIM. That’s why, instead of pouring more money into Windows Phone, Microsoft should just buy RIM. RIM’s Blackberry is so closely linked to the enterprise, and so integrated with Microsoft’s Exchange, that it is already the default Microsoft phone, anyway. By buying RIM, Microsoft could leverage that integration, and reinforce their grip on the enterprise space which is already under assault by Google. However much it costs to buy RIM, it’s still better than pouring billions down the rathole that is Windows Phone.

UPDATE: Microsoft has revealed the sales figures for Windows Phone 7 so far. They just emphasize that Windows Phone 7 is toast!

I was a judge at the recent Cloudstock Hackathon. Cloudstock was an event held as part of Dreamforce, and the hackathon required entries to use two apis from the sponsors of Cloudstock. I had a great time, and I was really impressed by the imaginative entries.

The official version of the ZDNet Chrome extension that I adapted from the Google sample, is available here: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plmjgigefjbepajlfhohlhhnlmhjnlde

UPDATE: Here are the SmartPlanet and TechRepublic extensions.

What are the limits of fair use on the web? If a journalist or blogger puts a lot of effort into a story, which is then summarized by a much more popular blog, are they being ripped off. Ian Shapiro, of the Washington Post, is debating this question right now in regards to Gawker’s summary of a story he wrote. Here’s the best analysis of the debate I could find: Gawker and the Washington Post: a Case Study in Fair Use.

Check out this video on ZDNet.

As Philip Elmer-Dewitt points out, Mac sales soared in Q1. This was mostly due to laptop sales. I’m part of this soaring, because I bought a MacBook recently. Why did I finally choose a Mac over Windows? One reason was that my kids use Macs at school. Another was that I don’t do Windows development anymore. The main reason, though, was that I took a look at Vista and decided it was too much trouble to go through the upgrade. Moreover, I couldn’t save money by buying a Windows laptop, because Vista’s requirements meant that I had to buy a higher-end laptop to run it. So, the Mac won out.

I just spent two very enjoyable days at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara. My take on the conference has been published on ZDNet by Dan Farber in this post: MySQL’s success leads to customer frustration. The headline is Dan’s, not mine, though I concur with the sentiment.

Scoble has another post on the subject of full-text RSS vs. partial-text RSS in which he argues that major sites like ZDNet would gain more than they lose by offering full-text feeds. I think he just doesn’t understand the economics of running a major content site. Scoble could link to ZDNet every day and it still wouldn’t affect the traffic. He is just too small a fish in the internet pond. Meanwhile, splogging of ZDNet content is already a problem that is causing us pain, and probably hurting us in Google. Full-text RSS would just make that Google problem worse, and would probably cost more traffic than ZDNet would gain from Scoble’s increased willingness to link.

So, I have been playing with Twitter the last couple of days, and I have become completely addicted. If you want to see how boring my life is, you can check it out here. As a more useful use of Twitter, I played around with the API, and you can now track the postings from ZDNet blogs on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ZDNetBlogs.

So, one of the things that I find annoying about my Mac is the lack of an insert key. Luckily, I ran across this tip somewhere (I can’t find the link any more). Function+M is the insert key on the Mac. Also, Function+Period is the delete key.