As reported by The New York Daily News, Donald Trump was addressing a group at the Learning Annex Real Estate & Wealth Expo, on November 19th and was quoted a stating, "Condoleezza Rice, she's a lovely woman, but I think she's a b----. She goes around to other countries and other nations, negotiates with their leaders, comes back and nothing ever happens."

Well that may be so, Donald, but at least she has better hair than you do.

Donald Trump is increasingly disgusted with the manner in which American government is dealing with the entrepreneurial spirit these days. In consideration of the fact that Mr. Trump is a self made success, I think he has every right to be upset. I believe, however, that the problems associated with growing a successful business from the ground up don't lie strictly within the government. Yes, excessive government causes many small business hardships and we need to deal with that, but I'm seeing an ever increasing volume of personal and social "score settling" being injected into the business world and I, for one, am troubled by it.

On a rather slow news day and week for Yahoo! and in the backdrop of rumors about Google buying YouTube for $1.6 billion, and MySpace founder demanding a probe into MySpace sale to News Corp, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) shares gained some ground today and finished the week on an upbeat note. Yahoo! shares closed at $25.47, up 29 cents or 1.15%.

The only thing of interest I found today was more information on local search trends. I have previously mentioned that Yahoo! and Google are neck in neck in local search market share.

Today I found some information about overall social local trend and Yahoo!'s specifically. According to this data, the growth of local search that is confined to directories has been relatively flat over the last year. However, social local search, that is, looking for user generated local content such as Yahoo! Local, has grown much more significantly.

Cutting through all the buzz about the New Netscape (which we'll continue to talk about, I'm sure), there has also been a lot of news today about social networking and social search. And for some reason the buzz is all centered on your Yahoo!s, your Facebooks, your MySpaces. No one is really including Time Warner in that category.

And yet ... everything Time Warner is really honing in on now, in the company's internet divisions, is about taking advantage of the social nature of its audience (and really: what is AOL but a bunch of people who love to chat with one another via email, IM, and chatrooms?). Netscape's hugely viral strategy is just one more in a long line of highly democratic media, from AIMPages to this very blog before you.

Investors wonder, wonder, wonder. Today the stock ticked up a teensy bit on the news of the New Netscape, 14 cents to $17.11. I know a lot of you will say "no" but ... is this a buying opportunity? Are investors failing to key in to the opportunities Time Warner is seizing? Or is it just that the conglomerate is to big and unwieldy to be managed by the monstrous and multiple personalities at the helm? I keep asking myself, is Time Warner too cheap to pass up?

Yahoo! and Netscape, oh my! Both are diving head first into the concept of "social search," integrating the mysterious ranking systems of the search engine with the cool democratic nature of the social bookmarking site. As Time Warner was preparing to launch its beta version of the new Netscape, Yahoo! was talking about integrating del.icio.us and flickr, two very very grassroots-y and user-driven properties, with the unknowable algorithms behind its search engine.

Jeff Weiner of Yahoo! says his social search will "tap the untapped authority of users" while Jonathan Miller of Netscape says "We want to marry the great editorial skill of humans and what systems and software can do to create something that is different and better."

These ideas are good and pretty but I have to wonder: how is this any different from how Google has given more weight to blogs in its search engines? How is this different from giving weight to incoming links (which are the most democratic of all democracies)? Yahoo! thinks I am the untapped authority, but really, I'm quite respectably tapped with some 8000 visitors a day to my personal blog: all through the power of my content. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg, other bloggers who fit the category are cashing checks from Google every month.

It's all lovely, and fun, and a good idea. But social search is just a new way of creating a network effect, and the end result will be no different whether you're getting popular through votes or links from your ever-expanding group of friends.