A few years ago, I wrote a blog post referring to the syndication networks as "sin-dication". I'm trying to be nicer these days as a tribute to Alan Rimm-Kauffman.

Fact: The quality of traffic coming from a search engine itself is of significantly higher quality than the traffic coming from its syndicate networks.

This has two important consequences:

Let's take some basic paid search principles and show how they apply to the syndicate partners. I'm going to make some simplifying assumptions to prevent us from getting mired in detail and missing the bigger picture.

To iPhone or not to iPhone? That is the question on which a number of high-profile app developers are weighing-in. A couple of weeks ago it was Facebook app developer Joe Hewitt and software maker Rogue Amoeba saying they'd had enough of jumping through hoops to be on the iPhone and that they'd be working on other things.

Last week, Instapaper web-service and iPhone app [iTunes link] developer Marco Arment said, "Go if you want to, but there are more than enough people in the App Store to keep me fat and happy and not nearly enough in any other mobile app ecosystem to draw me away." I'm paraphrasing of course.

Comment It is becoming increasingly obvious that a virtual server wastes great chunks of its memory occupied by the operating system wrappers around the applications in the virtual machines (VM) running in the physical server. If each VM occupies 50MB, and 20MB of that is the Windows O/S, then around 40 per cent of the servers's DRAM holds repetitive and relatively useless code.

In a virtual server a main function of the O/S wrapper around the apps is to provide a bridge to facilities controlled by the hypervisor. If there are 20 VMs then there are 20 copies of, say, Windows, all doing pretty much the same thing - which, if you added the essential part to the hypervisor, could be cut by 19 copies since the VMs would then share the now centralised Windows O/S.

Despite the massive success of the App Store, the actual app approval process has been a constant source of criticism for Apple. A couple of well known developers have recently quit from developing iPhone apps altogether due to the process. Businessweek recently interviewed Apple's senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller who predictably defends the process:"We've built a store for the most part that people can trust," he says. "You and your family and friends can download applications from the store, and for the most part they do what you'd expect, and they get onto your phone, and you get billed appropriately, and it all just works."

eBay suffered an embarrassing failure on Saturday as no one was able to search on the site - not a good thing at the start of Christmas shopping season.

The outage is made worse for the online tat bazaar because it is moving away from mom'n'pop traders to more professional sellers who expect better service, in exchange for their fees. Buyers posting on auction forums were still complaining of problems as late as Sunday afternoon, despite eBay's claims that all was fixed on Saturday night.

Holding out for a £100 e-book reader before snapping up one of these gadgets for yourself? You may get lucky this year, but don't expect prices to fall any further.

Scott Liu, head of screen maker PVI - the Taiwanese firm that recently bought e-ink pioneer E Ink - forecast today that readers will not drop to hit the $100 (£61/€67) mark in 2010.

The reason: the market's too new and there's just too little competition between e-book reader manufacturers, he said, according to a report by DigiTimes.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency is to more than double what it spends annually on its IT deal with IBM.

It has signed a three-year extension to its existing Partners Achieving Change Together (Pact) ten-year deal, which covers technical infrastructure, operation and support, as well as transformation and system integration projects. The extension, which runs from 2012 to 2015, is worth £300m, according to IBM.

Lab Many of your comments on some of the virtualisation articles we have written to date have suggested that smaller organisations have different challenges and priorities when it comes to virtualisation. Here we report back on what we have been told so far and ask you for your insights.

The majority of vendors assume that small businesses are significantly different from large enterprises in every respect...

Annoyed because you have to leave your e-mail inbox every time you would like to respond to someone else's Facebook status update? Good news: the social network is testing a brand new feature that will enable you to comment on threads by e-mail.

It appears as if the new feature is currently being tested only with a very small subset of users; we haven't seen it at the bottom of any Facebook notification e-mails yet and there are only about 4 tweets from the past couple of days mentioning the new feature.

NASA handed out $350,000 in prize money to astronautical haberdashers vying for glory in the space agency's Astronaut Glove Challenge this weekend.

Peter Horner of Maine, a previous Glove Challenge victor, saw off stiff opposition from Ted Southern of Brooklyn. Horner's glove was deemed to have all the protective qualities offered by current NASA spacesuit gauntlets, and yet to be easier and more flexible to use. The contending handwear was tried out inside a small vaccuum tank at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida.

Apple (AAPL) is under fire from some developers for the way it vets applications that can be sold on its online App Store. Facebook developer Joe Hewitt goes so far as to say he's "philosophically opposed" to the very notion of a company deciding which applications can and can't be used on its hardware. The presence of "gatekeepers" in software development "sets a horrible precedent," he says.

Customers of online tat bazaar eBay were on Friday denied the chance to bid for bits of former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, when the site swiftly pulled a listing for samples of his blood and brain.

The alleged remains of Il Duce, in three glass ampoules, were pitched at a starting price of €15,000. His granddaughter Alessandra Mussolini, former glamour model turned right-wing MP, was co-incidentally at a seminar on internet crime when she was told of the outrage, and was not best pleased.

[Sweden] The much – perhaps justifiably – hyped music streaming service Spotify has extended its mobile reach significantly today with the release of an app for phones powered by the Nokia-led Symbian operating system.

This follows earlier clients for both iPhone and Android and means that the service will now be accessible on millions more handsets from Nokia, obviously, along with Sony Ericsson and Samsung which also support the platform.

Rupert Murdoch is in talks with Microsoft over his plans to delist his newspaper websites from Google.

Of course, if he was serious about this, he could get his techies to add a robots.txt file to all News Corp sites and effectively disappear from Google immediately.

This could suggest that Microsoft is prepared to pay people to provide content for Bing. This would, hopefully, build Bing's market share and hit Google's revenues too, although the search engine has long claimed its news site brings in very little revenue.

Phil Schiller, Apple's SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, is back on his one-man crusade to defend the App Store from the latest wave of criticism pointed in its direction.

This time, Apple is having to battle the news of Facebook's all-star developer Joe Hewitt quitting the platform, more high profile app rejections, and the rise of Android as an increasingly viable alternative to the iPhone. Schiller has granted BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl what the publication says is his first "wide-ranging interview on the matter".

Leccy Tech Chrysler's e-car strategy has vanished down the plughole, taking with it any chance of us getting intimate with the Lotus Europa-based Dodge Circuit.

Things have been ominously quiet at Chrysler's ENVI e-car division for a while and now the firm has confirmed that the division is no more.

The announcement also means drivers will now never have the opportunity to play with Chrysler’s planned range-extended plug-in hybrid Jeep or MPV models.

While it might be a dream of publishers–hard hit by the digital tsunami and blaming Google for the crisis–Microsoft is not likely to fork over the big bucks they'd need for exclusively indexing their content.

"Microsoft isn't the monopoly guy anymore," joked one source close to ongoing talks between Microsoft and publishers, most especially News Corp. (NWS) and Associated Press. "So, it's not going to be the bank for publishers."

Spotify, the European music service that attracted attention by launching the first streaming music app for the iPhone, now has a version for Symbian smartphones. Spotify is a fantastic app, offering access to over 6 million tracks; unfortunately, it's available only in certain European countries, with the US version pending.

Some of the smartphone models SpotifySpotify now works with are Nokia 6220 Classic, E71 and 5800 XpressMusic models, as well as some non-Nokia phones, like the Samsung GT-I8910 Omnia HD and Sony Ericsson Satio.

EarthLink email customers experienced outages over much of the weekend, according to numerous online complaints.

Starting Friday, Twitter users began to post updates about service outages. Alex Mendez tweeted “33:40 minutes on the cellphone dealing with TW / earthlink. UGH,” and Diane Fischler wrote, “Not getting email messages again. Woke up to about 60 left over from yesterday’s Earthlink outage, now seems to be down again. Who else?”

Another big, albeit much more down to earth bet on the online book rental market from VCs. Online book rental service BookRenter is announcing it has brought in $6 million in a first round, less than a week after rival service Chegg raised $57 million in its fourth round of funding. Both companies let college students rent textbooks, so they don't have to buy them. A third competitor in the booming market is Campus Book Rentals.