“What do I want to take home from my summer vacation? Time. The wonderful luxury of being at rest. The days when you shut down the mental machinery that keeps life on track and let life simply wander. The days when you stop planning, analyzing, thinking and just are. Summer is my period of grace.”
—Ellen Goodman

The search and ad sales merger between Microsoft and Yahoo! has been talked about for a while, but this week it finally happened.

DMNews reports on the deal, as does AdAge, CNet and Search Engine Journal (a live blogging of the conference call announcing the deal). PaidContent.org has a bunch of links over here that will keep you busy for a while.

It’s going to take a while to see how this all shakes out, but Microhoo! has a large hill to climb to seriously challenge Google: According to Market Share, Google commands more than 81 percent of the global search market, while Microsoft and Bing combined have about 14.5 percent.

AdPulp alerts us to this North Korean beer ad.

I am not a fan of Best Buy. I’ve had enough run-ins with them in the past that my family refers to it as “Worst Buy” every time we drive past it. So you can imagine how it pains me to acknowledge that what they’re doing with Twelpforce and Twitter is really interesting and worth watching closely. Their Twelpforce teevee commercials are really good, too, though I have to imagine that convincing the powers-that-be to spend significant budget on a Twitter-themed ad campaign probably took some doing.

… and move over, Twitter: Inside Facebook reports that Michael Jackson’s Facebook page has 10 million fans.