MICROSOFT and Yahoo! have discussed a possible partnership before, but now Yahoo!’s woes and Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6-billion bid to buy the Internet portal might mean this scenario is just that much closer to becoming a reality.

How do you feel about a Microsoft-Yahoo! (Microhoo?) merger? Do you think that would  make Yahoo! cool again, and that it would finally make Microsoft cool?

Anyway, you can also check out INQUIRER.net reporter Erwin Oliva’s story, “Yahoo! board responds to Microsoft bid.”

HAVE you already tried Wikia Search, the new search engine from the people behind Wikipedia? This project has been one year in the making, but the alpha version is now open to the public. (By the way, as I previously blogged, Google interestingly enough has announced a Wikipedia-like service called Knol.)

I’m trying it out but as you can expect at this early stage, there’s no way I’d choose this over Google. Wikia Search is pretty up front about the quality of its search results at this stage:

Wikia is working to develop and popularize a freely licensed (open source) search engine. What you see here is our first alpha release.

We are aware that the quality of the search results is low..

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YAHOO! has launched the beta version of a new social networking site known as Mash, which is by-invitation only for now. I was fortunate enough to get an invitation just a few minutes ago. Thanks ultraweb for the invite — much appreciated.

I’ve just begun customizing the profile he set up for me, so it’s really bare right now. The pic shows me with my daughter Sam, who’s 5 years and nine months old. We took the pic using Photo Booth on Mikaela, my MacBook Pro, with the sepia special effect applied to it.

It’s funny how Mash got leaked to the press, apparently due to an honest mistake, as recounted in the New York Times.

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IT took a bit longer than we anticipated, but we’re happy to finally announce the launch of our new INQUIRER.net VDO service in partnership with Yahoo!

iVDO is part of our long-term goal of making our content available on all platforms. It’s part of our whole multimedia thrust, which has been our goal since the beginning, though of course as you know some things happened along the way, heh

But now that we’ve completed the transition to INQUIRER.net under our new company Inquirer Interactive Inc., you’re going to see even bigger things ahead. And we couldn’t be happier that we found a partner like Yahoo!

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OK, talks seem to have fizzled out, but if it had pushed through, or, heck, if it will eventually push through, would a Microsoft-Yahoo! megamerger have made sense? Would it have worked?

Some analysts say it’s a question of if, not when.

Others have pointed out that it wouldn’t make much sense.

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