Advertisers came out against the potential ad deal between Google and Yahoo in a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Justice yesterday. The deal, announced in June, would allow Google to display text ads on Yahoo, with Yahoo deciding when and how the ads display and taking a cut of revenue. 

In its short announcement of the letter, the Association of National Advertisers stated the deal "will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising."

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Zoho has finally added a central document management page called Zoho Docs to tie together its many useful online apps. The clean-looking, functional page looks much like the Google Docs start page, with a folder view on the left and all files - spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc. - listed on the right.

You can create folders and drag and drop files among them, and also right-click files or folders to quickly share, tag, rename, etc. You can also sort the file list by created time, modified time or document type (such as documents or presentations). 

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If you use Firefox 3 and Yahoo Mail (the nice new interface, not Classic), you might be dealing with a bug I've noticed where the message pane scrollbar doesn't display.  It's not a game-breaker, as you can still use the page-down and page-up keys to navigate, but it's an annoyance. 

It was a mystery bug for me, as only my primary workstation suffered from it. Two other systems had no issues. Disabling all addons on my afflicted system didn't change the situation. Neither did starting in Safe Mode, which surprised me.

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Google got some serious gold, promotion-wise: Olympic cyclist and Gold Medalist Kristin Armstrong wrote that Google Earth was "invaluable" in helping her find a training route in Boise, Idaho similar to the Olympic course in Beijing.

Armstrong tipped the hat (helmet?) in a guest post in the Google Lat Long Blog, which covers Google Earth and Maps. In it, she describes how at her husband's urging, she took one of his GPS units on her time trial ride back in December. After exporting the GPS and elevation data and loading it into Google Earth, she "was then able to trace the entire course from the comfort of my home half a world away and find a similar route to train on back in Boise."

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StartupNation, a Web site for entrepreneurs, has begun taking applications for its 2008 Home-Based 100 contest. If you have your own company, the competition affords an opportunity to market yourself - and of course, be marketed to.

I found out about the competition from one of my own home-based business service providers, RingCentral. While there's no material prize for winning, the free advertising from a good ranking could be worth plenty.

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Hulu.com, a well-made site offering free, ad-supported streaming TV shows and movies through a Web browser, now tops CNN and Turner in U.S. video site rankings, according to Nielsen stats relayed by Silicon Alley Insider.

Despite an official launch only five months ago and a relatively small library of shows and movies, the site offered up 105 million streams in July, just behind ESPN's 106 million streams.

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Windows Vista hasn't fared so well since its debut. Its generally low reputation among customers has led one Forrester analyst to dub Microsoft's latest OS "the New Coke of tech," while some studies have suggested that nearly a third of customers who buy a PC with Vista pre-installed may actually be downgrading those machines to XP.

Still other customers seem to wish the whole thing will just go away. They don't want to hear about Vista at all -- they'd rather hear about Windows 7, the upcoming OS from Microsoft that will be Vista's successor. And given the dismal consumer reaction to its latest attempts to market Vista, Microsoft seems willing to oblige. The sketchy early reports of Windows 7 have lately grown into a steady trickle of hints and rumors. The catch is, not all of it sounds particularly encouraging.

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Sure, Yahoo Finance rocks. But plenty of other, smaller sites offer good data for the online investor. Yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle outlined seven of them.

In Harry Domash's piece, most of the seven were new to me, though I had written about one of them (tickerspy.com) here previously.

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It looks as if Microsoft's OOXML office document file format will be published as an open standard after all. The International Standards Organization (ISO) today rejected four appeals from subsidiary national standards bodies that claimed ballot irregularities during the standardization process. Had these appeals been upheld, an OOXML standard could have been delayed indefinitely, despite Microsoft's best efforts to fast-track the process.

Barring any further hold-ups, ISO is expected to publish the full text of the standard within the next few weeks. But as the dust clears, many IT managers and office software users will likely be left scratching their heads: What does an open standard office file format from Microsoft actually get us?

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With the constant flow of me-too social networking sites these days, it's nice to see a well-made site that identifies a real need and meets it. For solar power planning, that's Roofray.com, which just launched this week. 

For your own custom plans, head to the site and start with a satellite view of an address you enter.  Then define the solar panel coverage area by adding successive points around space where you'd put panels. 

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