Globalization of the internet

LARGE COMPANIES CONSOLIDATE WEB CONTENT Globalization, Sometimes called Walmartization is picking up speed on the internet. This time, however, Walmart is not taking part as they have kept their quarter trillion dollor company out of the content market, which is what the internet is. This of course is not for lack of trying. They have moved into the music market but can't seem to beat out iTunes, and DVD rental which fell so far behind Blockbuster and Netflix that they nixed the idea and decided to just resale Netfllix service. The news of the day is that News Corp is buying IGN. Also known as "Snowball" network. Which includes Gamespy.com & Rottentomatoes.com. If this is a bad (or good) thing is yet to be seen. This caught my eye because Rotten Tomatoes has been a nice, non-corporate, place to see what movies are good (and how good). Will the future of Rotten tomatoes include a push for Fox Movies? The new Family Guy DVD may have been a front page feature before because its a hilarious show, now if it shows up as a featured DVD it may be suspect. Some of the site i have used as free good utility sites is Flickr.com and Sacramento.Craigslist.org. Flicker (as well as konfabulator and others) have been purchased by Yahoo! which is becoming more google like by day, and Craigslist has been partly purchased by ebay.com. However the big three search engines still remain big developers of content rather then purchasers of such they all incorporate acquisitions into their empires. THE BIG THREE AT HOME One thing we see in the world of the big three is that the differences are starting to blur. In-fact they crawl each other so many of the results are the same as well. The biggest most recent change is a more open development and customizable pages. Although MSN and Yahoo have long made their home pages customizable they have recently made FULLY customizable pages that can have your choice of web feeds among many other things. The result of Open Development and Customizable pages make the three into the same function. One develops a feature the others can release the same feature almost immediately. OPEN DEVELOPMENT Google: Google Labs labs.google.com MSN: MSN Sandbox sandbox.msn.com Yahoo!: Yahoo! Next next.yahoo.com Custom Pages Google: http://www.google.com/ig MSN http://start.msn.com/ Yahoo! http://my.yahoo.com/ MSN's custom "Start.com" is, as stubborn MSN is apt to do, Internet Explorer only. However it is by far the best with full RSS compatibility and popular RSS feeds to start with.