It's times like this, that I take my hat off to mainstream media. The ability to keep up with the ongoing Yahoo/Microsoft/Icahn love triangle is something MSM journalists have honed down the years-even if it takes two New York Times staff writers to keep up ! The bottom line is that Microsoft )and Carl Icahn( last week submitted a new, sweetened bid for Yahoo's search business.

OK, I'm exaggerating the headline a little-I'm mostly jealous of those of you who've snagged a new iPhone-but rumors have resurfaced that Google is in fact working on a "Gphone." It seems that Google may have deeked us with its launch of Android-which was enough to stop the chatter about an actual Google piece of hardware.

It is with a heavy heart that I bring news that Office Depot has entered the Reputation Deadpool. How did it happen? Let's do a Wayne's World flashback shall we? July 7th - The Deal I saw that Office Depot was offering a Toshiba portable hard drive at a fantastic price. I normally order through Staples but decided to give Office Depot a shot. After all, Office Depot was offering free next day delivery-sweet! July 7th - 2 minutes later OK,

I knew you were wondering, since none of us are sure these days, but Yahoo is still giving it the old college try. Here's the latest from the Yahoo battlefront. Although a few of our commentators insist that the Yahoo/Microsoft deal is all but inevitable, Rupert Murdoch disagrees. And I think he might knowafter all, his properties, especially News Corp, have been courted by both sides almost since the beginning for support in brokering and/or funding a deal.

OK, you've waited long enough. It's time to reveal the winner of this year's Annual Search Engine Marketing Scholarship contest. I could fluff this intro out, but I know you'll skip down to the winning entry anyway, so here it is: Winner: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics - Linda Bustos Congratulations to Linda Bustos who won the majority of votes from our expert judges. Linda's entry was a great template for any "how to" article.

I won't lie to you, today's going to be a tough news day for us internet marketers. Just about all of the focus is on Apple's Launch of the iPhone 3G . Fortunately, I found these morsels to share and we'll have other stories up, as we discover them. All Things Digital tells us to expect an announcement this morning that Britain's Guardian newspaper has acquired new site/blog paidContent .

If a picture is worth a thousand words then this one is worth at least twice that. This photo is from July 10 the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Yahoo's founder Jerry Yang )in middle with head in hands( is talking with Google founders Larry Page )l( and Sergey Brin )r(. Considering the current state of affairs of the parties represented here I have to suspect that this conversation may have gone something like this: Larry: So Jerry, how's it going?

If you're anywhere close to Charlotte, there's still space for my talk on Online Reputation Management this evening . Back to the news. Yahoo's having a big news day: Yahoo has partnered with Click Forensics to reduce click fraud. Didn't we already know this ? Yahoo has been granted an anchor text in links patent, originally filed in 2002. Bill Slawski has the details on what it means for SEO .

Many established and well respected blogs within the online marketing community have recently started to make their audiences available to a variety of new voices. The opportunity for new bloggers to communicate their ideas on internet marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization, paid search, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing have never been greater. Today Michael Gray announced on his blog that he was ready to start accepting guest bloggers .

The US Senate is holding a series of hearings on online advertising, behavioral targeting and privacy to determine whether they should consider legislation protecting consumers online in these areas. The Senate has turned to Google, Microsoft, the FTC, Facebook, privacy watchdogs and others for their opinions in the matter. Some, like Google, welcomed a "comprehensive privacy law that would establish a uniform framework for privacy and procedures to punish bad actors.

Forget the 20,000+ employees that help Google grow its market share every day! Yahoo just signed on 6,602,224,175 volunteers to help it grow its share of the search space. 6,602,224,175? A pretty impressive number, huh? That's the current estimated population of the world, and Yahoo has just made each and every one of us an honorary Yahooligan, with the launch of its Build your Own Search Service-aka BOSS . BOSS is a new,

Oh my goodness, it's Linky Goodness! Though we mentioned this morning that YouTube's overhauling its advertising system , another important point in the WSJ article is that YouTube will be running both preroll and postroll ads soon . More on the Yahoo/Microsoft Saga. )I'm so tired of this. I've had to resort to creative writing at work to make myself report the news.( Today, Jerry Yang is saying that Microsoft is intentionally trying to destabilizing Yahoo ,

Today, Google Fellow Amit Singhal posts on the Official Google blog explaining Google's ranking system. But before you all start salivating and clicking, note that this is a very "high level" overviewno secrets given away. Still, it's a good reminder of the basics of Google's ranking system. Singhal writes that Google's ranking system is based on three guiding principles: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction,

When looking back in history, we can find many great role models for the importance of building a great reputation. Eleanor Roosevelt will be remembered for her life-long dedication to being an advocate for civil rights, but did you know she was one of the earliest reputation management experts? Here's one of her famous quotes: "We all live in a televised goldfish bowl.

Visiting the mountains is a full on quest for discovery. Just this past few days, look at what I've discovered: Lost Creek - yes, despite a big sign pointing the way, it appears I'm the first to discover it. Hidden Driveway - poor driveway. All it ever wanted to be when it grew up, was hidden, then someone goes and spoils it with a big sign. Falling Rock - there must be more than one town called "Falling Rock" in North Carolina, because I see signs for it everywhere!

It appears that even Google stubs its toes from time to time. While being the model of the new economy company with cool offices, free food and time to be creative there are still some old fashioned problems that are affecting the growth of the internet icon. The one that is reported on in the Wall Street Journal this morning is none other than sales operations. Let's back up a tiny bit fist to look at one of the results of an apparently tangles sales system at Google.

This must have been a tough one for the search giant to figure out. People read numbers better than they do colors. Google has started to add Approximate word counts on their Adwords keyword tool , along side of their vague colored bar graphs, which used to be the only data they gave. The reason behind these moves by the big G, or small g or whatever they are being called this week, is likely their realization that the future of paid search is in the small business.

A little under two years ago, I sat down with Google's Niniane Wang and had a very interesting "off the record" conversation. Despite the secrecy, she wouldn't tell me much about the secret social media project she was working on. Fast forward to today, and she's announcing Google's new Lively.com . A while ago, I looked around the social web and wished that it could be less static. Sure,

Either my connection is suffering, or it's just a slow news day. But here are the best news items I couldn't write more than 100 words about! Erm, the best news items that were so well-written by their original authors that I couldn't say it better myself! Arteworks has been fighting against would-be SEO trademarker Jason Gambert for a while now and shows Gambert's latest stunts: after citing Wikipedia in his trademark application, Gambert Edits Wikipedia,

Ok, so it's no great secret that the online activities of web users can be tracked so what's the fuss about NebuAd? In an attempt to make the advertising delivered to their customers more targeted several smaller phone and cable providers have been using NebuAd )Who named this company by the way? They should be looking for a job in another field.(.