Moves these past few weeks by Yahoo! and Google are revealing.

Google has launched, in beta, their RSS reader and reviews have not been good. Most have criticized it’s interface as being pretty, but complicated. I’ll add another critique: it’s evil. Like the best RSS readers out there, it gives you the option of taking a post and emailing it to others, or posting it to your blog. Guess which applications it forces you to use to do so? Google founder Sergey Brin in a recent interview: “We believe in sending folks to other sites. We’re not about trying to create our own content to keep people on Google, we’re about sending them off.”. Yeah…. right. Did you see Google Reader before it went public Sergey?

Yahoo!? Well today it just integrated blog search with news search! That’s right. That’s respect. That’s forward thinking. That’s listening to customers. It’s not perfect. But it’s a real start. More in PaidContent, in Search Engine Watch, and in Yahoo!’s Search Blog.

The contrast here is amazing. Yahoo! embraced RSS early on. And now properly integrates blogs into news search results. Google took ages to recognize RSS, and it’s blog search is tucked away, like a dirty secret or something.

Jason Calacanis explains why he’s staying at AOL.

Ebay is acquiring Verisign, who just the other day acquired Moreover and Weblogs.com. Does this mean that Dave Winer… will work for eBay!?!

And I wrote a long piece (for me that is) on local blogging, the A-list, ConvergeSouth at Philly Future yesterday.