Marketing Pilgrim

The single biggest PITA for Yahoo has decided to leave his board position.

If you’re not aware of just how disruptive the self-labeled "activist investor" Carl Icahn has been, a quick review of our archives should bring you up to speed.

It appears that Carl Icahn isn’t happy unless he’s getting his way, and for all intents and purposes, he’s had his way with Yahoo. After criticizing the company for not selling to Microsoft, forcing his way onto the board of directors, then dumping a bunch of shares, our prediction that he was about to bail, has come true.

In a parting statement, Icahn appears to offer legitimate praise for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz:

With Halloween looming in the very near future one wonders if the ‘reconnect’ feature’s algorithm doesn’t have a little bit of ‘All Hallow’s Eve’ mischief in it or is programmed for the macabre. Either way it is managing to upset more than a few Facebook users with suggestions that border on the, well, bizarre.

Mashable shares with us some of the experiences that have been reported as a result of the Facebook ‘improvement’.

Unfortunately Facebook’s algorithms can’t account for some less desirable scenarios: according to Twitter reports, the site is recommending that users reconnect with ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends. It’s recommending they reconnect with their (current) husband or wife. It’s even advising people to reconnect with friends who have died, causing obvious distress. These aren’t isolated cases: there are scores of Twitter reports of these issues.

While this UPS sponsored video at Mashable is slick, I’m scratching my head over it.

Aside from the fact that it’s extremely basic–which is probably UPS’s intent–I’m just not making the connection between a courier service and social media.

Can anyone help me out? Why is UPS sponsoring this?

You ever have one of those moments when you say something so crazy and off the wall that it has got to be true? For me this happens without me even giving a second thought about it because, to be honest, most of the time it tends to be exactly how I feel–and being sincere is what this whole thing is about, right? So today’s story is about being sincere and having high standards.

No, seriously, they added magic.

As you’ve probably noticed today, Google Reader has added a few new features. The first is the Explore section, just below the People you follow section. Here, Google shows off two sources of new feeds: Popular Items and Recommended Sources. As you might guess, the Recommended Sources feature analyzes your feeds (via Reader Trends) and Web History to find feeds you might like. (This is the old Recommendations feature.) Popular Items highlights “top-rising images, videos and pages from anywhere (not just your subscriptions).” It identifies these items algorithmically (how else?) and sorts them in the order they think you’ll like them.

The magic isn’t just in the mind reading, however. It’s also in the feed settings: now we can order items by newest, oldest or . . . magic.

Despite a 18% drop in earnings and a 14% drop in revenue in Q3, Microsoft still beat Wall Street estimates for its earnings per share by 25% (eight cents).

Naturally Microsoft’s revenue reports cover their bottom line, which includes all of their software, hardware, gaming and other offerings, not just their search engine. Bing falls under their Online Services Division. Last year, that division posted an operating loss of $321M in Q3; this year it’s down to a $480M loss.

A large part of that loss may come from the $100M marketing blitz to promote Bing—or that cost might have been listed in Q2 of this year.