Wait, did you hear that?  Me neither.  The Saturday, 4/26 deadline given to Yahoo by Microsoft for its takeover offer came and went without any resolution, and according to a New York Times story today on the topic, "two companies are still not talking."

So the question now is whether Microsoft will give up, or attempt a hostile takeover.  The NYT story says Ballmer hinted at the possibility of walking away last Wednesday, but TechCrunch today posted up bios for 10 people it thinks Microsoft may name to the Yahoo board in a proxy fight. Candidates range from the former eHarmony CEO Jaynie Studenmund and former Nextel CEO John Chapple to the Director and Chairman at Virgin Media, James Mooney.

If you haven't already seen Denny Arar's list of new Web apps she saw at this week's Web 2.0 Expo, be sure to take a look.  I don't know about you, but the faster and faster pace of free service launches make me grin hugely even as my head spins.

Denny looks at six different sites and services, both fun and productive.  Some allow for creating multimedia slide shows or Flash Web pages, while others offer document collaboration and online notebooks. She also checks out Intel's Mash Maker browser extension for creating your own mashup page, and a feature rich but quick-to-use file sharing and communications service.

If the thought of working for a nimble, fast-paced new company gets your blood flowing, you might be interested in a new job-aggregator site that pulls together listings from almost 20 different online sources, large and small.

Hotstartupjobs.com scans sites ranging from big names like hotjobs.yahoo.com and monster.com to smaller players like ajaxian.com and jobcoin.com.  Posts are first split into 'All Jobs' and 'Mostly Tech' categories, and then divided by source.

Tech icons Apple and Google top BusinessWeek's 2008 list of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies. This year's ranking adds three financial data points - revenue, margin growth and stock returns - to survey results from company executives and senior management to decide which business belts out the brightest innovations.

Apple took the top spot for its products (though I hope not for its aggravating and deceptive practice of pushing new software through an update channel). Google, which just released a better-than-expected earnings report, came in at number 2 for its 'customer experience.'

A seriously goofy Microsoft sales-team video on YouTube titled "Rockin' Our Sales" initially had bloggers and sites like Gizmodo and Engadget jumping on it as another example of how Redmond just doesn't get it. 

Is your company's Web site hacked?  Today, it can be hard to tell. Online crooks who successfully break into a site often sneak in small bits of code that leave no visible trace but can attack visitors who simply view the page.

In fact, according to a Websense Security Labs report (pdf), online thugs who want to spread their viruses, Trojans and other malware are more likely to hack an existing site than to put up their own poisoned page. Of the malicious sites the company found in late 2007, more than half were hacked sites.

Admit it. Sometime in the last week you've probably wished real harm upon a co-worker for hitting 'reply all' and cluttering up your already overflowing inbox. It's ok, I have too.

So I was happy to run across a blog called Workers' Edge from a former (non-spamming) co-worker, Dennis O'Reilly, with three recent posts on managing e-mail in Thunderbird, Gmail and Outlook.  For Thunderbird and Gmail he has advanced search tips for finding the message you need among all the reply-all garbage, and for Outlook he looks at an add-on called Xobni that can help sift and organize your messages - though you have to request an invite to participate in the Xobni beta.

Google last night launched a preview of its App Engine web application hosting service.

If you're still not convinced that you can get top-notch information from blogs, take a look at a BusinessWeek story just launched today titled Financial Blogs: The Best of the Bunch.

In the piece, Karyn McCormack covers the best available blogs and blog portals on investing, economic trends and all things financial.  I'm going through them all myself to see if there are any gems to add to my own feed subscriptions.

Speaking of which, if you haven't yet found your own preferred feed reader for staying on top of all this great stuff, the excellent FeedDemon from NewsGator is now free.  I've been using it for a few weeks and it's serving me well.  If you'd rather not have to install any software, Netvibes.com offers a great online reader.

And finally, if all this talk of blogs has you wanting to start your own, I posted a couple of weeks ago on how doing so can help your business.

Yahoo's stock price dipped 3 percent in after-hours trading (according to its own finance site) on news that Microsoft may lower its buyout bid.

A Reuter's story quoting 'people familiar with the matter' says Microsoft thinks Yahoo may have lost value as a company since Redmond's original offer. BusinessWeek says it's a taste of what could happen if Microsoft pulls out entirely, but Rob Hof notes that it's "probably little more than the latest twist of a negotiation process."

Meanwhile, Google confirmed that its winning strategy during the recent 700mhz auction was not to win. Instead, it bid only to trigger the open applications and open handsets license conditions. More from TechCrunch and the Google Public Policy Blog.

I work from home on the west coast. The other morning, a well-meaning source on the east coast returned my call as soon as he got into the office. Which meant I got woken up at 6am.

That groan-inducing occasion, along with my not wanting to keep handing out my home and cell numbers to everyone, had me hunting around for a good Voice-over-IP business phone solution. And I think I've found one - RingCentral.com.