It's been fascinating to read how Rupert Murdoch, sick of Google "stealing" his content, has joined forced forces with Microsoft's Bing in a deal that would see Microsoft agreeing to pay Murdoch for exclusive rights to list his content, something that Google will not do.

But is there another agenda at play? And will it work? Newsweek blogger Weston Kosova argues that it will only drive readers away because news on the Web is so plentiful. And in any case, technology will win out. "If the Web gets divvied up, with some sites pledging loyalty to this search engine and others to that one, we'll likely see a slew of search engine aggregators that unite the disparate results on one page. Why? because people don't want to have to wander all over creation to find what they're looking for, and they'll reward companies that make it so they don't have to," Kosova writes.

Meanwhile Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has warned Murdoch that he all he is doing is trying to put the genie back in the bottle.

But the most intriguing analysis comes from Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff who argues that all Murdoch is doing is trying to scare Google into coughing up some cash.

"This is a Murdoch tactic: To impress Wall Street and to scare competitors he implies that epochal and tectonic deals and alliances are about to be done,'' Wolff writes. "He’s jawboning. What he wants to do is to scare Google into coughing up some cash for newspapers. Now, while Google would surely not be scared by a Bing-Post lock-up, it is, on the other hand, not immune to the myth of the inevitability of Rupert Murdoch. Even though Bing and the Post might be laughable, the Google boys don’t laugh at my Uncle Rupert. They’re afraid of him, like everybody else. That’s what he’s betting on, to use his fearsomeness before it is gone. He’s got to hurry, I believe he knows."