My, my, my. Just a few weeks after the hew and cry over how idiotic and ludicrous Sam Zell’s comments were about trying to work “something” out with those “boys” at Google for Google News ripping off content at the Tribune, what do we have here?

A report out of the Scotland Sunday Herald that Google has capitulated to several UK newspapers in deals that would allow them to continuing “syndicating” their content for a fee. This is pretty Big News as Google hasn’t yet capitulated to anyone else — except the AP in North America, Agent France-Presse en France, and Belgium in … well, Belgium — so, it seems to be trying to hold their ground on all manner of fronts, including the YouTube front against Viacom.

Which, as the article rightly points out, might be the reason why you haven’t heard anything from Google just yet as it tries to fight off other newspapers ’round the world for these rights.

Google settling with newspapers — is this any surprise? Not really.

After all, we’ve heard from executives at Google that they feel that Viacom’s legal wranglings are nothing more than an elaborate gambit at trying to affect the licensing of copyrighted content on YouTube.

… which seems de rigeur these days.

And didn’t we just see Rupert Murdoch pull the plug on Photobucket’s widgetized videos days before its actual purchase? Who knows how that might have affected negotiations and the final purchase price (”See? We *own* you Photobucket … “)

So in spite of how, yes, Google doesn’t make any direct cash off of Google News, they have clearly deemed it a priority, and I think in this year we can forsee it making all kinds of deals to make sure that it is able to broadcast and / or be able to report on all kinds of content. Goodness knows it has the cash to do so, and it was almost prescient when it made its purchase of YouTube that it set aside a $200 million dollar warchest *just* to deal with its legal issues.

Google buying start ups every few days … making aggressive deals with content providers … building a dark fibre network punctuated with data centers …

Google’s on the move, folks. And the year’s not even half over, yet.

I’m no stock analyst, but I do love an unsubstantiated rumour: is Rupert planning on flipping the web property he spent $650M on at a valuation 10x the asking price? Beats me (some educated folks say the valuation, is, and I think its a technical term here, “hokey”) — but other offering a metaphorical patting on the back, I’m not quite sure why he would tout out numbers like this and provide statements to the effect of “if it were to sell today”.

Does Mr. Murdock know we don’t?
In spite of the staggering dominance (or not), of MySpace in the social networking arena, are there tell-tale signs that no one is privvy to that make it a lame-duck investment in the long run? Have his diviners and tea-leaf readers discovered that its a difficult proposition to monetize effectively and quickly? Or that its full of spammers, stalkers and sexual predators? Or that trying to expand the brand the rest of the world would be a Pyrrhic attempt at best?

Who knows?  But it is fun to wonder. ;)

With Office Live — a suite of small business online offerings, such as a calendar, messenging, hosting and so on — is currently in invitation-only beta, Bill Gates is publicly throwing everyone a bone.

Microsoft may, in fact, release a true “Office” lite product online, which may have a full suite of web-based productivity applications.  Mr. Gates has gone on record saying (courtesy of the Financial Times): “We’re going to cover 100 per cent of the productivity needs – our track record is to keep innovating.”

With no timetable on the horizon, will we ever see a web-based “Word”, “Excel” or “Outlook” in the near future?  And how much Microsoft resources have been devoted to this project?  Can we expect another out-of-the-blue announcement by Microsoft a la Xbox360-streams-HD-programming-from-non-Disney-sources?

Hard to say.  But Bill does leave us with this tasty morsel:

While maintaining that most office workers would continue to use full versions of the Office desktop software, Mr Gates suggested that they would in future find it easier to access their work from any machine – one of the advantages of the online services.

“There’s a difference between actually running an application on a server versus letting a document be found on a server,” he said. “We’re going to make a push to let you keep documents on a server.”

According to at least a couple of observers, the 2 (or 2.5gig) limit is being pumped up to over 15gigs. Personally, I’m at around 15% of my usual 2.8gig limit; some might wonder what the deuce people are going to do with 15gigs of email space.

Well, it fits perfectly within GMail’s raison d’etre — which is “never delete email”, and dovetails perfectly with the rise and sharing of rich media … particularly since the acquisition of YouTube probably sends the “we’re a media company now” message has been sent out anyway. [courtesy of Googlesystem.blogspot.com]

Some users of Google Apps for Your Domain report that their Gmail accounts have 15 GB of storage space. There are at least two people who noticed it, so it’s hard to consider this a mistake.

In any case, Google probably has bandwidth and storage to spare. If / when it goes through its probably nothing but a good thing.