Networking: I was wrong. In this morning’s post, I suggested that Seagate gobbling up Maxtor might be the final merger of the year. Not so. Late this morning IBM pulled Micromuse into the Big Blue fold, saying that the inherited technologies will help customers manage the mixed traffic speeding through their networks. What’s next? Best of the blogs: The prolific Jon Udell posts an experimental screencast to reflect on the year in tags — including step-by-step instructions on how he constructed it. SaaS: While multitudes of folks these days sing the praises of software-as-a-service, one harsh reality of the subscription model came to light when Salesforce.com’s service went out, and left many customers in the dark, so to speak. It was not clear how extensive the outage’s impact was and, in fact, even though some customers were without service for the better part of yesterday, others reported no problems. Security: Just in time for Christmas, a Santa Claus IM worm is leaving virtual coal in the form or a rootkit on the systems of AOL, MSN and Yahoo instant messaging users. The rootkit, dubbed gift.com, attempts to shutdown desktop antivirus software and starts collecting the user’s information for broadcast over the Internet. 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_12-21-05.mp3 Technology Industry