Carl C. Icahn took his first steps into the Internet earlier this year by beginning a blog. Now he's about to get some help.

The activist shareholder has hired Dane Hamilton, a hedge fund reporter at Thomson Reuters, to work on his Web site, The Icahn Report, according to people briefed on the matter. Mr. Hamilton is expected to contribute original reporting and analysis to the site, augmenting Mr. Icahn's own voluble opinions on the state of corporate America.

Mr. Hamilton will start working for the site this month, these people said. He declined to comment; Mr. Icahn could not be reached for comment.

Monday's launch of Shine, which will use a blog format, is aimed largely at giving the struggling Internet company additional opportunities to sell advertising targeted to the key decision-maker in many households. Yahoo said advertisers in consumer-packaged goods, retail and pharmaceuticals have requested more ways to reach those consumers.

Amy Iorio, vice president for Yahoo Lifestyles, said internal research also shows women are looking for a site to aggregate various content and communications tools.

"These women were sort of caretakers for everybody in their lives," she said. "They didn't feel like there was a place that was looking at the whole them - as a parent, as a spouse, as a daughter. They were looking for one place that gave them everything."

Yahoo is partnering with media companies like Hearst Communications Inc. and Rodale Inc. for content exclusive to Shine. Hearst publishes Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping and other magazines aimed at women, while Rodale publishes a range of magazines on sports and recreation, including Women's Health.

A tipster believes Yahoo has created a list of 1,500-2,500 jobs that may be eliminated in the next two weeks. CEO Jerry Yang will reportedly make the decision to go forward with these layoffs--or not--next week. Jerry reportedly wants to announce the cuts with or before earnings (January 29th), but may not make them if the stock price recovers.

Two years to the month after launching its large podcast search and listening site, Yahoo! has announced that Yahoo! Podcasts will cease operation on Halloween, October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before the plug was pulled. There's not much information available beyond an underlined non-link now at the top of the site reading "Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007."

"Yahoo Photos will get a lot of Flickr features, and there are a lot of other areas around Yahoo that will also be Flickrised where Flickrization would be good," Fake said in a blog post about the acquisition. "Yahoo Photos and Flickr have different kinds of users with different needs, and will remain separate for the foreseeable future."

Since Flickr IDs were merged with Yahoo IDs, I've seen problems at Flickr that I hoped wouldn't invade. My photos have been faved by people intending to use them for their own profit, trolls have driven by some of my favorite groups and taken a shot, and hackers played some serious games with people’s heads and accounts at the end of March. I attribute a large part of this disruption to the accessibility that the Yahoos had when their ID worked seamlessly with Flickr, since it was concurrent with the merge.

But the most significant changes are are under the hood. Instead of presenting a default set of content to new users to start them off, My Yahoo is now analyzing known data about the user (zip code from IP address and the areas of Yahoo that the user visits often) to create a customized version right at signup. So, for example, if the user tends to go to the Yahoo Movies property occasionally, a Yahoo Movies module will be auto added when they create a new My Yahoo account.

But perhaps more significantly, to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Using the Pipes editor, you can fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique (with the "ue" this time:-), count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. In short, it's a good start on the Unix shell for mashups. It can extract dates and locations and what it considers to be "text entities." You can solicit user input and build URL lines to submit to sites. The drag and drop editor lets you view and construct your pipeline, inspecting the data at each step in the process. And of course, you can view and copy any existing pipes, just like you could with shell scripts and later, web pages.

Creating a new Pipe, however, is not for the wary. The mere volume of available options to both expand and narrow down hundreds (or thousands) of pieces of data, combined with the seemingly endless array of (sometimes rather ambiguous) input boxes for each and every module in the pipe, is likely to be daunting for the novice user. Therefore, the service is not likely to be something that the majority of Yahoo!'s everyday users are going to use, but more likely to attract the early-adopting, slightly more technical crowd.

Because of this, Pipes may take off among tech geeks and have enough meme power to remain in the collective consciousness for a while, but may not be able to become a hit trend anytime soon. Content publishers may also become wary of Pipes altering their relationship with the end user by allowing users to manipulate, reformat, and ultimately alter content as they so please. Mishmashing content from all around the web sounds like fun for the user, but some fear that it could decrease brand awareness and reduce webmasters' abilities to track content usage patterns.

Yahoo is not saying what it paid for Mybloglog, but knowledgeable sources said it cost a little over $10 million for the company, which first offered the service in July. Bradley Horowitz, vice president of product strategy at Yahoo, said Mybloglog will likely remain branded as a separate entity, but Yahoo users will be able to register on it with their Yahoo password. The reader communities will soon be able to access Yahoo services, like the Flickr photo site or the Yahoo Answers information service, to their groups.

"This closes the loop between readers and publishers," he said. "Every publisher wants to know his readers, and the readers want to find out about each other. It's the power of implicit networking."

Web advertisers, of course, want to know about everybody. Mybloglog is currently available on about 45,000 blogs, according to company chairman Scott Rafer, and has registered the photos and personal information (like the address of their blogs) of about 33,000 readers. Rafer also said it looks at about 1 million readers of blogs a day. Its most popular blogs are, not surprisingly, on technology subjects, but also on real estate – making the user information valuable to multiple advertisers.

The finding comes from a comScore report on U.S. Internet audience numbers for November that's due out later this week.

"Fox Interactive Media is obviously driven primarily by MySpace," comScore analyst Michael Rubin said Monday. "The bulk of their growth is from MySpace."

Fox Interactive Media's total U.S. page views increased to 39.5 million from 38.7 million during November. By contrast, Yahoo’s page views declined to 38 million from 41.6 million.

"Fox Interactive Media passed Yahoo for top property by page views for the first time," UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote on Monday in a report.

"Current is exploring better opportunities to distribute our content," Current TV spokesman Alex Dolan said on Friday. He declined to elaborate. A Yahoo spokesperson said the company does not comment on rumor or speculation.

Current TV, co-founded by Al Gore, is a San Francisco-based national cable and satellite channel that features video created by viewers.

"We are no longer accepting uploads to the Yahoo! Current Network, but would encourage you to upload your videos to another pod family. If you landed here with the intention of uploading to Yahoo! Current Driver, your piece should find a home in Current Speed. Yahoo! Current Traveler submissions will fit in nicely with Current Travel, and Yahoo! Current Action pods should go to Current Edge."

Despite buzz to the contrary, MyBlogLog.com is not yet the property of serial acquirer Yahoo Inc. This comes straight from Scott Rafer, the former CEO of search engine Feedster and now CEO of the popular blog community tracker.

"We've got a lot of balls in the air at the moment," Rafer said. Rumors that Yahoo was buying MyBlogLog for $10 million have been floating around the blogosphere since the Web 2.0 "summit" earlier this month. MyBlogLog encourages people to build connections and communities around their favorite blogs.

One of Yahoo's PR firms, OutkastPR, emailed us to say that this story is innacurate, and that Yahoo has not acquired MyBlogLog. We dug a little deeper with some insiders and it appears that Yahoo and MyBlogLog are in very early acquisistion discussions, and nothing more. Founder Scott Rafer was completely silent when asked about the rumors today - suggesting he didn’t mind getting all the press attention.

Dave McClure, from the audience, asked why Yahoo hasn't acquired Six Apart's blogging tools or Facebook to gain some faster traction in blogging and social networking. Horowitz responded, "We put Yahoo 360 out there and learned a lot from it. 360 may be doing a 180, and change and adapt to address the opportunities." He didn't offer any specifics as to what the 180 degree turn looks like.

Filo added, "We are absolutely interested in blogging, and we hope five years from now to be a major player in that space. We will look at acquisitions."

Seeking Alpha aggregates and edits information from more than 200 leading investment and industry experts who use blogs, financial newsletters and authored articles to share their personal expertise. The news is then categorized and tickerized to run on the news pages of individual stock quote pages on Yahoo! Finance. Initially, more than 60 articles will run every business day on Yahoo! Finance, covering an average of 100 different stocks on a daily basis.

"The number one objective at Yahoo! Finance is to help our users make informed financial decisions, and Seeking Alpha significantly expands the information we provide to our audience," said Peggy White, general manager, Yahoo! Finance. "The new blog content also brings a different perspective to our users by offering commentary from the experts who work in the financial industry."