The news beat: A look back at the headline-grabbing and the more elusive occurrences in IT during 2005. IBM tightens the links between its Alphablox analytics software and Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Portal Server. Microsoft says it will use the Firefox RSS icon in Internet Explorer 7, and IT vendors align with universities to adopt guidelines for collaborating on research. Best of the blogs: Now that it has concluded, Greg Nawrocki thanks the SETI project for providing grid computing with a decade of free PR. Dave Linthicum writes that the big push in SOA for 2006 will be to join enterprises with Web 2.0. And Jon Udell weighs in with his predictions for next year. Columnists’ corner: In What will 2006 hold for open source? Neil McAllister predicts what the New Year will and won’t bring to the open source movement. What 2006 won’t be is the year of desktop Linux, but the OS will show up in a host of other end-user devices. Think cell phones, PDAs and media players. Oh yes, and an increasing number of vendors will claim to open some of their products, which will only serve to confuse customers even more. Listen now to the audio companion for this blog. InfoWorld Daily Podcast: Enterprise technology in 5 minutes or less.https://akamai.infoworld.com/podcasts/IFW_Daily_12-19-05.mp3 Technology Industry