St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Sun Microsystems said on Wednesday that it will pay $1 billion to buy MySQL, the provider of a popular open-source database.

In case you’re not a Web Developer (because if you are you are certainly at least familiar w/ mySQL), MySQL is thew most common open-source databases out there. It’s the database behind most custom web applications and many of the open-source web applications out there like Joomla, Drupal, almost every blogging system (wordpress, etc.), php-Nuke and many many others.

MySQL CEO Marten Mickos had previously said that the company intends to go public rather than be acquired. Its business model is to give away the source code and its database for free, and to charge customers an ongoing subscription fee for support and services.

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We all knew it would happen as soon as Microsoft made a deal with AOL and as part of the deal was that AOL would purchase the Netscape browser and cancel all future versions. That was a couple years ago. It seemed pretty obvious to most they would eventually just stop[ development and stop offering Netscape as a download.

Well they finally announced they are doing just that.

Tom Drapeau, AOL’s director of the Netscape brand, announced in a blog post Friday that AOL will cease development on all Netscape web browsers on February 1, 2008. The company will continue to support the current version of the browser, Netscape 9, by releasing patches or security fixes until that date. After February 1, all development will stop.

Drapeau recommends that anyone running a Netscape-branded browser make the switch to Mozilla Firefox, the open-source browser upon which the last few versions of Netscape have been based.

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NEW YORK (Reuters) - Content online is king. Internet users spend nearly half their time online viewing news or entertainment content, surpassing activities such as sending e-mails, shopping or searching for information, according to a study released by the Online Publishers Association on Monday.

The four-year study, conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings, tracked a 37 percent increase in amount of time spent viewing content such as online videos or news, surpassing a 35 percent rise in using search engines like Google Inc. (GOOG.O).

The abundance of content and faster online speeds accounted for the spike, the study said. A proliferation of social networks such as News Corps’(NWSa.N) MySpace and Facebook have helped boost content viewing as well.

Overall, viewing content accounts for 47 percent of time spent online in 2007, up from 34 percent in 2003. Web search accounted for 5 percent of time spent online in 2007 from 3 percent in 2003.

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Sooooo Embarassed!Story Update:
I’m so embarassed, I was hoaxed! Turns out the whole thing was a hoax perpertrated by Matthews Cutts hisself as an April Fools Day prank! The site is back and working fine. Here’s the story I mistakenly wrote about the event:

Google’s Matt Cutts Blog gets hacked!Matthew Cutts, the engineer who works for google and runs the official blog for communications from Google to SEO experts and novices alike has had his site hacke yesterday. Some say it may have been an april fools joke, but today’s April 2nd and it’s still hacked!

In case Google has regained control over thier web site by the time you read this I’ve provided a screenshot of what it looks like when your web site gets hacked.