MediaFile

Rumors continue to swirl that Yahoo would like to buy Groupon, the fast-growing group-buying service.

But Yahoo’s heart seems to be in partnerships these days, and the company announced on Tuesday that it had struck a deal to offer Groupon deals in its new local offers program.

Groupon is one of 20 partners in Yahoo’s local offers program, including Goldstar, ScoopSt and ValPak.

Yahoo executives, who briefed reporters about the new program at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, were tight-lipped when it came to describing what its local offers service would actually look like or when it would officially be introduced, noting that different iterations of the service were currently being “bucket tested” to users in the U.S.

The general idea of the program is to offer coupons from local merchants that are specially targeted to Yahoo users based on the users’ location and other data Yahoo has about the user (similar to the way Yahoo targets online ads to Web surfers).

(Note: Strong language contained in quotes in paragraph 3)

By Sarah McBride

Famously salty-tongued Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz says she is trying to cut down on the expletives she uses “because people make so much of it.”

She said her swearing was “honest” language used to make a point, and she considered it more acceptable than “dirty” or gratuitous swearing. If she were male, nobody would pay much attention to it, she told Reuters on the sidelines of the Women’s Conference in Long Beach, California. on Tuesday.

Bartz caught flak earlier this year for telling Michael Arrington, editor of the TechCrunch blog, to “fuck off” during a TechCrunch conference. Arrington had asked if her marketing pitch about Yahoo relative to Google was “BS.”  In a conference call with analysts last year, she spoke out about problems with the company’s management structure, saying that “nobody is fucking doing anything.”

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz once played in an accordion band, so perhaps it’s fitting that the ole squeezebox has figured in to Yahoo’s products as the central motif in a revamped Internet search experience.

Yahoo has unveiled a snazzy new search interface that lets users flip between a stack of vertical tabs to view different types of results. Search on the rapper Lil Wayne for example, and you can quickly tab between groups of results like albums, videos and Twitter messages.

The new search interface, which the tech blogs have nicknamed ‘the accordion’, represents Yahoo’s first big overhaul of its search product since partnering with Microsoft.

Yahoo confirmed news of a departure tri-fecta, in which Hilary Schneider, EVP of the  Americas, David Ko, SVP Audience, Mobile and Local, North America, and Jimmy Pitaro, VP Media, all jumped ship.

In addition to telling the public, Yahoo also decided it was time to communicate with its staff (most of whom learned about the departures from the AllThingsD blog post that broke the news). Chief executive Carol Bartz and Schneider both sent out internal memos to the troops on Thursday afternoon, copies of which were obtained by Reuters.

The first email, from the desk of Carol Bartz:

Carol from the foxhole here. No, actually I’m in Atlanta to give a speech later tonight, and doing some client meetings.

For the first time ever in the search world, Microsoft’s Bing overtook Yahoo in August search share,  according to the latest data from Nielsen. Bing’s 13.9%  share edged out ever- so-slightly Yahoo’s 13.1%.

It should be noted that Microsoft and Yahoo have a partnership that kicked off in August that involves Bing powering Yahoo’s search. If Nielsen combined Bing-powered search it would represent a 26% share of search.

While Bing and Yahoo scrap for second place, Google blows everyone out of the water with a 65% share of all U.S. searches.

Anyone with a Facebook account knows how addictive social networking can be. But a new report by analytics firm Nielsen illustrates just how central social networking has become in the Average Joe’s day-to-day life.

Nearly a quarter of Americans’ online time is now spent on social networks, according to Nielsen. And all that time spent on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter is coming at the expense of traditionally popular Web activities, particularly email.

Email accounted for 8.3 percent of Americans’ online time in June, down from 11.5 percent a year earlier.

When Media General reported its quarterly results this week, the company made sure to highlight that its increased digital revenue — up 8 percent — was due in part to its relationship with Yahoo.

“It’s one of the few game-changing partnerships we have had,” Media General digital media president Kirk Read said in an earlier interview.

The publisher of The Tampa Tribune and Richmond Times-Dispatch is part of the 800 or so newspapers that appointed Yahoo to be one of its digital sherpas. The partnership involves ad serving technology, content sharing and, until the sale of Yahoo’s Hot Jobs to Monster, online recruitment. Since the Internet giant launched its ad platform known as APT 18 months ago, the alliance has sold $100 million in Yahoo inventory.

Arianna Huffington and James Pitaro photo courtesy of Beet.TV

Traditional media companies have spent the better part of two years trying to cope with the double whammy of recessionary forces washing away advertising revenue and the changing habits of consumers. So how do a bunch of young buck  Internet companies see themselves ?  As media companies!

Well sort of. Not, you know, old school media companies.  Rather, “technology enabled media companies,” as  James Pitaro, vice president, media at Yahoo phrased it when pressed on Tuesday during a  panel discussion about the future of media hosted by I Want Media.

Pitaro was on hand with a bunch of other big names like Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post;  David Eun, AOL Media president; and Josh Cohen, senior business project manager at Google News. (Go here for the complete lineup).

AOL turned 25 today, prompting Chief Executive Tim Armstrong to make the rounds with co-founder Steve Case to celebrate the milestone. AOL has a colorful and much chronicled history, which we won’t go into detail here. What is most interesting to this reporter is  not AOL’s  past but rather its plan to pitch itself forward  as a content company just at the point when traditional media — we’re  looking at you newspapers –  are undergoing wrenching operational changes.

All of this is to say that content, especially good local content, is expensive to produce even when the plug has been pulled from the printing presses.

Yet AOL executives believe there is a vein to mine and have been snapping up professional journalists while casting wide nets to capture “citizen reporters” eager to get their names out by covering the goings-on and activities at the neighborhood level. AOL is hiring expensive professionals to complement inexpensive user-generated content tied to search engine optimization. Ad dollars, the company hopes, should follow thanks to its technology platforms that AOL believes can maximize ad revenue.

The news that Yahoo is spending $75 million to $85 million on an ad blitz has provoked a wave of disparagement in the blogosphere, with many critics slamming Yahoo for throwing more money away on an ineffective marketing strategy.

But much of the outcry appears to stem from a misunderstanding.

The $75 million to $85 million in advertising is actually part of the $100 million campaign that Yahoo announced in September; It does not represent an additional $75 million to $85 million in ad spending.

A Yahoo spokesperson confirmed that Yahoo has only spent between $15 million and $25 million on the “It’s You” ad campaign since it was rolled out in September, with the remainder of the $100 million budgeted for the new ads, which represent phase two of the campaign.