It's clear to me that on lot of pieces will be moving around the blogging chess board this year. Trader Mike has a view from the financial markets that is worth noting. And this is only the beginning.

David Jackson has written a compelling argument for Yahoo! buying Six Apart, the makers of Movable (one 'E') Type and TypePad (and now the new owners of LiveJournal). As I've written here before I'm surprised that many of the blog plays haven't been snapped up already. I could see the likes of Bloglines, del.icio.us, Technorati, etc. being taken out by a Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or (gaps!) even AOL. I never considered Six Apart as a target but as Dave clearly shows there's good reason to buy them. I could see Google snagging them as a way to protect all those blog pages on Six Apart based blogs that are already part of Google's AdSense program (like my blog). It sure seems like a question of 'when' and not 'if' these guys will be acquired. Too bad none of them are public companies so we could join in on the fun.