Today, they announced earnings. No one cared.

Yesterday, Apple announced earnings…EVERYONE cared.

After Yahoo announced a tripling of earnings (i imagine all from cost cutting), you CAN’T find one story on TechMeme about them. Apple is still the whole front page. Actually, there is one story on TechMeme…the head of Yahoo Apps ( freaky Bill Gates lookalike) resigned . Oy.

Yahoo is getting lighter for sure. They have gone from an obese 500 pound, ugly American, to a 320 pounder. Still fat, hard to look at and mostly tired, but a flickr (get it) of light and hope.

In my world, if you mention Yahoo, you think of one thing…Yahoo Finance. For all Yahoo’s flaws, Yahoo finance still rocks in it’s aggregation of data. It does everything I need except a normal conversation (go read the comments to Tech Ticker and the message boards) and a completely live, honest and raw video 24 hour finance network. They could fix that pretty quickly :) .

Yes, they should have taken the Microsoft offer, but it’s kind of cool they told Ballmer to stick it. I probably would not have and you know what I think of Ballmer :) .

With a market capitalization on $24 billion and sales of $6 billion it is hard for me to get excited about the stock or company on any kind of valuation or momentum formula. That said, kudos to 12-13 year old company that could be this big, hated, loved and ignored this much.

Wallstrip has featured Nike twice and never Yahoo. There is a reason…make that a few billion reasons.

In one of my first posts on trends way back in 2005 , here is what I wrote about Nike:

Golf – Just getting started

Tiger Woods is maybe the best deal of all time. I remember the way Knight was filmed following Tiger around at his last amateur win, what now seems like decades ago. Turned out to be a bargain. What a wily guy he was.

Until Tiger does something stupid, you are OK with Nike.

The whole country is white and over 80 and ther are enough courses built and being built to have one for every person in the United States. Do the math. Stay out of Jail Tiger, please.

You hear ‘NIKE’ you think of just a few things, Phil Knight, GREAT branding and marketing (Swoosh and commercials), Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.

You can’t define Yahoo at all…I think of traffic and missed opportunity.

Fake Steve has an excellent guest post by Fake Jerry Yang (Congrats Dan Lyons on leaving Forbes for…anywhere – actually Newsweek) that summarizes the idiocy of all that is Yahoo. They are a used and abused brand.

It comes from having no focus and no leadership over a now extended period of time. The board members should be in Putz prison. They should give back any and all compensation since 2003.

So why is Tiger worth more than Yahoo?

Forget market cap for a moment and think about Tiger and Nike as a trend.

Tiger had knee problems and he knew it was in the best long-term interest for him, his career and his fans, to go in for surgery, and take time off to rehabilitate. Eight weeks of pain for all of us (does anyone watch golf anymore if Tiger is not in the field? ) , but Tiger is now moving forward again and based on the U.S. Open results, we have already forgotten about the eight weeks we missed of his greatness.

Yahoo has had ‘knee problems’ for quite a while. They keep putting bandages on it.

Yahoo should just say they are going on for ‘knee surgery’, like Tiger Woods, cut out all the diseased tissue (lawyers, biz dev, acquisition department, bloated management) and get back to focusing on a strategy for their traffic.

They won’t. Instead, they will be fodder for many more ‘Fake Jerry Yang’ posts.

In the meantime, I will stay long Nike as I have since I started this blog.

Check out the stories over on TechMeme :

ZD Net

New York Times

BoomTown

I guess Microsoft is getting lot’s of free press.

Microhoo, Yasoft, or Microsoftyhoo (no a), all make sense.

It’s a good day to do it with Google down $30 plus. Fred has all the details .

I just called it a dog a few days with their only hope a takeout. I guess i should have bought it, instead of ripping it. Congrats to al my frinds at Yahoo. I hear Microsoft has better health care for the VP’s.

Disclosure – No Positions

Chaos…YES…with a dash of occasional Rationality

So Alibaba debuted in the casino of a market they call China. The particluars of this financial screw job are here on Bloomberg (not that it is not an important internet business). Alibaba is the perfect example of why you can own the best FINANCIAL BRANDS, especially on weakness. The credit crunch is just a small setback to these sales machines. These suits make so much money in times like this. They always have product they can package and sell. It’s called scarcity wrapped with great hype.

I love the way people piled into Yahoo as ‘THE’ cheap play on Alibaba. The stock has dropped more than 10 percent in the last week. Same shit, different names and day. Down 10 percent, now may be the time to play it if you believe Alibab holds it’s market cap. That game is not for me.

Hopefully, IPO’s can make a resurgence to open up the market for smaller businesses to tap the public markets. Than you won’t have to pay up as much for young, hot businesses. I think we are headed this way. The investment banks are in a deep hole and they need a new cash cow.

Or, this is just another disgusting warning for impending doom.

Tim will tell.

Here they are:

Disclosure – This daily post is dedicated to the bears who will point to it yet gain as ‘THE’ Top.

I could not find that scene on YouTube (Google must be a short and definitely overpaid :) ), so I hijacked my favorite scene from the movie instead (Google stole YouTube):

The hating hit a crescendo not too long ago with the stock at $22. Today the stock is back at $29 after hours. I have no idea if Yahoo is out of the woods but if the market is happy with Yahoo they will be very happy with Baidu and Google.

Congrats to my friend Mark Pinkus , who was banging the table and buying the stock through the abyss. Today was the potential beginning of the payoff. Or not. Either way, there are better ways to play this bull market. Here is my fun interview a while back with Pinkus .

Disclosure – Long Google and Baidu

1. The Facebook/Microsoft chatter is now deafening.

2. Amazon is back at all-time highs and has an iTunes killer? :)

3. RIMM goes up 5 percent a day, so does Apple and Baidu.

Most important, the laggard internet juggernauts are up 15 percent the last few weeks – Ebay and Yahoo. These are the media and blog world whipping boys.

As my friend Phil twittered today- Something is building.

My thoughts are that the deals and rises are too easy and too loose. Too much back patting and knuckle fives.

I will continue to diversify and add breakouts because the tone is great and the fed is easing and the US government is spending like the good christian drunk sailors they are. I am listening to the tape and although I feel that a huge high beta drawdown is at hand, the tape says we are o.k.

Maybe this time a gigantic tech/internet merger is just the beginning. Stranger things have happened.

PS…next to me :) , if you like the market and are not following Phil on twitter , you are a putz.

I am more convinced than ever, that stock ‘twits’ is a major opportunity .

I have written about the service often which is like a Techmeme for thousands of topics.

Yahoo scopped it up and with their page views, the service should get lot’s of traction. Things move so fast in this space and it will be interesting to see how the ‘MEME’ landscape looks 12 months out.

I met Alan through Fred Wilson and we became fast friends and he also invested in Wallstrip . Yahoo gets a smart tech and news guy to help build out the platform further.