The news beat: Some of the happenings that made our most important stories list won’t surprise you; others may rekindle memories so distant you’d have thought they actually happened last year. Inside our piece on 2005’s 10 biggest stories you’ll find news ranging computing giants, Google, HP and Intel, to the proud up-and comers, such as AMD and Salesforce.com. There are successful, failed, and still-to-happen merger stories, as well as another pick that will likely blossom not before year’s end, but sometime in the near future. Columnists’ Corner: Silicon Valley and Hollywood might seem like odd bedfellows, but the two are getting a bit closer than the rest of us should be comfortable with, and the relationship could inhibit Web 2.0’s promise of two-way media, writes Jon Udell, in The two-way media Web. “The textual Web has, finally, embraced the two-way model that Tim Berners-Lee envisioned right from the start. That collaborative style is, more than anything else, what the Web 2.0 meme describes. But so long as the tech industry aligns itself with Hollywood’s agenda of control, the two-way media Web will remain an elusive dream.”Security: Microsoft fixes ‘critical’ hole in IE. Thus far, attacks have not been rampant, but users should install this fix soon. Search: First, a short question: What is SEO? Well, it stands for search engine optimization and that, perhaps, is where the simplicity ends and complications begin. Juan Carlos Perez of the IDG News Service explains how SEO works and lays down some of the basic principles, and what companies should know when considering SEO. Google’s blogger, meanwhile, gets blocked again in China and a survey determines that Chinese users widely support controlling Internet content. Software Development