There was an interesting article in today's NYT about the mediocre success of telecommuting. In theory, the idea of working from home is appealing to employees, who can toil away from the comfort of their homes without the hassle of commuting, while employers get to save money by using less space and other costs. The only problem is that only a small number of people actually work from home even in the age of broadband access, cell phones, laptops and VOIP. Why? Simply put, humans need contact with other humans. If you've ever worked from home by yourself, this makes a lot of sense. I mean, the first little while, it's cool to work in your sweats. But it's not very long - unless before you're really disciplined - that you start browsing gossip sites, checking your personal e-mail, and seeing if there's anything interesting in the fridge. At least, that was my experience but I'm a weak, weak person. That said, I wouldn't mind working at home on Mondays or Fridays because there's a lot to be said about not having to join all the other rats scrambling to work to start the week, or fleeing from work on a Friday afternoon.

In the new, exciting Web 2.0 game of who's going to acquire who, Blogspotting's Stephen Baker tossed out the idea that Microsoft could buy Technorati. Frankly, I do think this deal is going to go down because Microsoft seems sofocused these days on ensuring its own applications are Web-ified and work seamlesly together. This approach is fairly easy to glean from Ray Ozzie's Christmas message in which he talks about service-enhanced sofware, Vista and Office 12. If Microsoft were serious about the blogosphere and RSS, it would have been in the market snapping up many of the hot start-ups that Yahoo, Google, et al acquired such as Flickr and del.icio.us. Microsoft has MSN Spaces but the company is far more engrossed in transforming itself from an old-style client-based software maker into an online application service provider with tight integration between its products. Of course, Microsoft has more than $30-billion of cash so it can buy anything it wants. But the fact it has done little shopping suggests Microsoft has bigger strategic priorities - most of them organic - so it makes little sense to distract itself with small acquisitions (even if Robert Scoble is "encouraging" them to do so).