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Yahoo announced today that it has purchased Palo Alto-based IntoNow, the television content identification platform and iOS application. When we wrote about Yahoo's new direction with Internet TV in January, we praised it as a paradigm shift. Similarly, we predicted that SoundPrint, the technology behind IntoNow, could act as a GPS for television content and change things drastically.

The pairing of these two companies could either be a big step for the next generation of Internet TV content and consumption or a big step backwards. Let's look at why Yahoo would buy a 12-week-old company for upwards of $20 or $30 million and what it could mean.

Yahoo is making a deeper commitment to open source software with the announcement this week that it has joined the Linux Foundation.

The Linux Foundation is dedicated to the advancement of Linux. For Yahoo, the decision to join is about its continued investment in Linux, virtualization and file systems technologies

Apache Hadoop is a file systems technology. And Yahoo was one of its early users and funders. This is not to say that Hadoop will be the focus of its collaboration, but Hadoop is primarily designed for Linux environments.

In the early 1960s, Paul Baran invented packet switching. Packet switching became the foundation ARPANET, which later gave way to the Internet. Baran died at the age of 84 last Saturday. But packet switching lives on after all these years as the primary foundation of computer networking.

But just as chips, databases and programming languages have entered a period of increased specialization, we may be seeing the beginnings of specialized network topologies. Last week several Internet giants, including Facebook, Google and Yahoo formed the Open Network Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The group's first priority is a protocol called OpenFlow. The key idea is to give network engineers more control over switches by giving them customizable firmware, supplanting the one size fits all paradigm of modern networking equipment.

Ever since Google launched its instantaneous search product last fall, I've noticed something - everywhere I go on the Web, I enter search terms and and pause for a second, only to remember that not everything has yet gone instant.

Today, Yahoo has announced that it too has gone instant, but with a slight twist on Google's solution to providing an ever faster real-time Web. Yahoo says it will offer "answers, not links".

While Yahoo has said that it is "absolutely committed" to social picture sharing site Flickr, the same might not be said for the folks at the top of the company. Today, Flickr head of product Matthew Rothenberg announced that he would be "stepping away from Flickr," the third such departure since Flickr co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake left in 2008.

Can Flickr hang on in the photo sharing realm or will other niche social photo sharing services and Facebook - the biggest photo sharing site on the Internet - take its place?

According to analytics firm StatCounter, the Bing search engine has just overtaken Yahoo for the first time worldwide during the month of February 2011. From StatCounter Global Stats, Bing closed out the month with a 4.37% search share compared with Yahoo's 3.93%. However, both still fall far behind Google's search share of 89.94% of the global market.

Blog community and data widget service MyBlogLog, acquired by Yahoo 4 years ago last month, will finally be put to rest by its parent company on May 24th, according to an email announcement sent this morning. ReadWriteWeb first reported that the service was on the chopping block in December 2009.

MyBlogLog was a service with incredible potential that was ahead of its time. It was like Facebook Connect, years before Facebook Connect. It was squandered by Yahoo. It's tragic. Below, an excerpt of our coverage of the service's pending demise a year ago, trying to capture the value it could have delivered.

Yesterday, Google released a Chrome browser extension that lets users block certain websites from showing up in their Google search results. That way, if you never want to see an eHow article again, you don't have to. Kynetx, a company that offers developers a single platform for building extensions for multiple browsers, saw the announcement and immediately offered $500 to the first person that could create an extension "with the same functionality for all 3 browsers and all 3 major search engines."

Less than a day later, the company has announced a winner and released the extensions.

Bing seems to be doing something right, at least according to the latest numbers from the Web analytics firm Experian Hitwise, that show its share of searches on the rise.

The data comes on the heels of a war of words between search engines Google and Bing which took the form of undercover stings and accusations of copied search results, as Google seeks to maintain its position as the premier search engine.

Yahoo is reportedly preparing to launch a new publishing platform next week which will deliver personalized news content to mobile devices. The content will come from users' social media connections, like Facebook and Twitter, plus users' declared preferences, search history and other sources.

Although the service will be available on Yahoo's website, too, it has been specifically customized for mobile devices like Android smartphones, the iPhone and tablet computers.