Carol Bartz: Former Autodesk CEO Bartz to head Yahoo

More at SFGate.com: “(01-13) 12:17 PST SUNNYVALE -- Yahoo Inc. plans to name former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz as its new chief executive, according to a published report, ending a two-month high-profile search for the struggling Internet giant.

She will replace Jerry Yang, Yahoo's co-founder, according to a Wall Street Journal article published online today. Yang said in November that he would step down after 17 months at the helm.

Yahoo declined to comment. Autodesk said it had no information. Bartz could not be reached.”

Dan Wetzel's Great Column On Tony Dungy and The Colts

Latest playoff push a rough ride for Dungy, Colts - NFL - Yahoo! Sports: “Through all the high-scoring victories, bids for a perfect season, wild comebacks, crazed finishes, playoff disappointments and, eventually, a Super Bowl triumph, the enduring image of Tony Dungy is one of calm.”

-- The column captures Tony's persona, but should -- does not -- mention his belief in Christ.

Mike Silver Says Zorn throws himself under the bus - NFL - Yahoo! Sports

Zorn throws himself under the bus - NFL - Yahoo! SportsMike Sliver: “Jim Zorn, I’m rooting for you. I really am. I resolved back in February to give you a chance as an out-of-the-box hire, and I hope you survive to coach a second year with the Redskins.

But could you kindly stop bleeding all over the place?”

Knowing Sil, I can actually hear him saying that!

Valleywag's Owen Thomas On Yahoo's Collapse

Valleywag, Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag: “Everything takes forever at Yahoo, the once high-flying, now famously sluggish Internet giant. Today's layoffs of 1,500 employees have been expected for months. And yet the strange thing is so many Yahoos seem unprepared”

The U.S. Supreme Court won't review Obama's eligibility to serve - Yahoo! News

Court won't review Obama's eligibility to serve - Yahoo! News: “WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth.
The court did not comment on its order Monday rejecting the call by Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J., to intervene in the presidential election. Donofrio says that since Obama had dual nationality at birth — his mother was American and his Kenyan father at the time was a British subject — he cannot possibly be a "natural born citizen," one of the requirements the Constitution lists for eligibility to be president.”

--- The last right-wing-nut Obama attack rejected! Now we can get on with the matter of improving this economy.

Y! Live Stopping It's Broadcast December 3rd 2008

I just saw this post  explaining that Y! Live, Yahoo's experiment in online broadcast distribution, will be going off the air December 3rd:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So it is with great sadness that I share the news that Yahoo! Live, a Brickhouse project in social broadcasting will be going off the air on 3 December 2008. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated. Without all of you, Y!Live would not have built the strong community that it has. It has been really interesting (and entertaining) to see all of the ways broadcasters have used Live, developing it into a place for all sorts of social interactions.

Barack Obama Wins Candidate Mashup Debate Poll - Huff Post

"Barack Obama Wins Candidate Mashup Debate Poll"

This news was just posted on the Huffington Post online news blog. The debate was the result of a collaboration between Slate, Yahoo, and the Huff Post. This win is significant, as the online event drew 1 million people.

Will Yahoo! Buy Facebook? TechCrunch Report Points To This Possibility

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch has posted a great article on Bear Stearns "suggestion" (I take it as a demand) that Yahoo establish a social networking function. His article seems to point to aquistion of Facebook. It seems Yahoo!'s playing catch up in two major areas: social networking and videos. And given the emergence of "plug-in" applications like the one SBS uses for its social network, the hole Yahoo! has to dig itself out of is getting deeper still.

I personally think Yahoo! needs to come up with the a next-generation web portal format. I know what they should do, but they'd have to pay me to tell them.

Yahoo!'s Appointment of Jerry Yang As CEO No Surprise To Me - My Idea!

This week, Yahoo! announced it was hiring -- or re-hiring -- co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO. The move comes as no surprise to me because I suggested it to a newly-minted Yahoo finance executive I was sitting next to on a Monday April 30th 2007 5 PM EST flight bound from New York City, where I was for the NFL Draft, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he and I both live.

The conversation started because we were talking about the web and "Web 2.0". In the process of the talk, we both revealed our occupations. He was only with Yahoo for about three months to that point and had just come from a meeting regarding the then-new acquisition of Ad Bright, the online ad company, in New York. I said that one reason Google was way ahead of Yahoo! was that there were two recognizable founders at the center -- Larry Page and Sergi Brin. By contrast, Yahoo's founders were no where to be seen. I said the best way to recapture some attention and institutional memory was to bring back Jerry Yang.

After the conversation, the man said little. He was working on a massive Excel spreadsheet that explained Yahoo's ad inventory and revenue estimates. OK, I absorbed a lot of information. Hey, it was in my face, what could I do?

Yahoo's website is an enormous system containing over 100 million pages and several billion impressions. I was really surprised at just how large the site system and the company as a result, had become. And it may be the very reason for the problems it faces -- it's so big both in site and company structure that it's lost it's identity.

Can Jerry Yang bring Yahoo! back? Perhaps. But I think the first move should be to simplify what's there. Yahoo's all over the place and it's hard to see it in a coherent fashion. Google's website design provides a key, as it's many services are neatly separated and grouped so one does not get lost. This isn't true for Yahoo!'s site at all.

Yahoo! needs to find a new design formula that's easy and timeless and scaleable -- and stick with it.