For all of you out there in the land of web development, here’s a reminder that Internet Explorer launches this month as a high priority auto-update. While the end result of the IE7 launch will be a far more developer-friendly Microsoft browser, the initial launch will no doubt be a turbulent time for the web, as many of the proprietary hacks and work-arounds employed to mend IE6’s various defects seem to cause new and annoying issues in IE7.

So dear developers, it is indeed time for us to hang up the venerable * html and Tantek Çelik Hacks, in favor of Microsoft’s sloppy yet useful conditional comments. I sort of feel like this is the end of an era. But then i realize it’s going to be a long time until we can safely leave out support for IE6 all together. A long time indeed.

I have a weakness for Mahjong. I’ll admit it. You can have Sudoku, I’ll take the tiles. Considering this, I decided to download the new Mahjong game from the iTunes Store for my 5G iPod. Games on the iPod? Can this really work? Well, at least in the case of Mahjong, yes, yes it can.

The games download quickly (much quicker than films) and get their own spot in the source list on the left side of the iTunes application. Games aren’t listed the same way as music and videos. They get their own backdrop and include a summary of instructions and tips. It’s a nice way to organize and looks really good.

Mahjong plays well and makes good use of the scroll wheel. The graphics look good and the play styles are interesting, there is even a “pass n’ play” mode for 2-player action. The best part of all is that you can actually listen to your own music as you play the game. The music that comes with Mahjong is good, but giving the player the ability to customize the soundtrack was a great move. I just played a round while listening to the Easy Star All Stars’ Radiodread and it worked great. No slowdown or problems with the audio that I could detect.

Because of the iPod’s design, I imagine that there will be a limit to the iTunes games catalog. There just aren’t that many titles that I can see making the conversion to a scroll wheel and one button. That said, some of the games that are already on offer including Tetris and Bejeweled should be quite popular!

So I got interviewed by the Wall Street Journal last week about my experiences with Apple’s iTunes Store. Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro found my recent post about the service while researching the story and decided to ask me for some additional comments. The story ran today and does a good job of surveying the movie download services currently available to customers. Unfortunately it looks like access to the article requires a subscription (when will old media learn?) but you can see a video interview with the reporter here.

Looks like Google has pulled the trigger on their YouTube bid: 1.65 Billion in stock has bought Google the company that proved social video could work on the web. YouTube’s purchase and subsequent transformation from past status as venture capital dependent startup to its future as a legitimate Google subsidiary will likely go down as a major event in the web history.

There are a plethora of question left over from YouTube’s days as a swinging single: how will copyrighted materials be treated? What about their $1 million per month bandwidth bills? What are they going to call this adopted child? If there’s thing we’ve learned from the tech sector’s mega-players it’s that you can solve almost any problem with money.

Gobs and gobs of money.