IT Buoy

Gina Bianchini, the high-profile CEO of social networking platform Ning , is stepping down and will become an executive in residence at the Andreessen Horowitz venture firm. Bianchini (pictured here) founded Ning with well-known Silicon Valley iconic entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. She will be replaced at Ning by COO Jason Rosenthal. Ning has raised about $120 million in funding since it was founded in 2004, and it has been one of the more high-profile start-ups and among the most closely watched. Interestingly, I pinged Bianchini last week about some controversies related to discontent among Ning techies I had heard about in the wake of the fall departure of SVP of Engineering Jay Parikh. She responded quickly, noting that VP of Engineering Sridatta Viswanath was doing a great job. And, she added, inviting me in for an update while betraying no sense of her impending departure, Ning was “gearing up for the launch of the next-generation Ning Network this summer.” Here is the post about Bianchini’s departure as CEO that will be on the start-up’s blog today from Ning Chairman Marc Andreessen: An Update from Ning Chairman & Co-Founder Marc Andreessen I’d like to update everyone on a change happening in our company today.

Yesterday, the monthly search market share numbers from comScore (SCOR) were released, showing Microsoft (MSFT) Bing up, Yahoo (YHOO) down and Google (GOOG) maintaining its dominance. In today’s release by Experian Hitwise , Bing is up again, from 9.37 percent to 9.7 percent, while Yahoo is flat at 14.57 percent, and Google gave up a scooch of share to fall to 70.95 percent from 71.49 percent. This time it appears to be the vertical searches–such as autos and health–helping Bing, which has been its strategy to differentiate itself from the Google juggernaut. Here is that table, which you can click on to make larger:

Well, I did call myself a “sparkly vampire” recently, due to my late-night blogging hours, but now it’s in a cartoon. I am not quite sure what to make of the comic by Newsvetter’s Andrew Fowler , who also created Guhmshoo cartoons, but it is definitely worth checking out. So, here is “All Things Digiphobic,” which you can click on to make larger:

Even the Justice Department gets it. The MicroHoo deal is pretty much about catching Google. But with a combined market share at less than half of Google’s, of course, that is an awfully tall marching order. Still, although the DOJ has not yet ginned up its courage to investigate the search giant–something it may never do, in fact–it approved the search and online advertising partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo (without any restrictions, mind you) as a kind of proxy. The key government regulator of such deals noted: “[It] would be likely to increase competition by creating a more viable competitive alternative to Google, the firm that now dominates these markets…Most customers view Google as posing the most significant competitive constraint on both Microsoft and Yahoo, and the competitive focus of both Microsoft and Yahoo is predominately on Google and not on each other.” In other words, MicroHoo floats together or sinks apart. Not that the companies want to paint it so starkly right away, loudly not mentioning Google (GOOG) by name after the approval Thursday. As Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer said: “I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to advertisers and publishers.” Instead, as you will see from a pair of Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz’s aggressively jaunty videos below, it’s all about improving the “search experience.” For Yahoo, at least, that had better be true, as it needs to stanch the decline in its search market share, much of which is getting eaten up by– uh-oh –Microsoft.

BoomTown will be hoofing it elsewhere today , so I am missing Yahoo’s search event, called SearchSpeak, at its Sunnyvale, Calif., campus this morning. Thankfully, I was at the Silicon Valley Internet giant earlier this week, getting a grilling from CEO Carol Bartz , and was able to talk to both Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy, and new hire Shashi Seth, the company’s SVP of Search Products. Seth came to Yahoo (YHOO) recently via a short stint at AOL (AOL), and before that, Cooliris and Google (GOOG). Both talked about the items on today’s agenda–a six-months’ look back at Yahoo search innovations, its upcoming Olympics shortcut on the search page, and a new mobile search app that uses a kind of Etch-a-Sketch drawing technology–using fingers, not keywords–to help users find stuff. While not quite ready for release, the app allows you to search by drawing a line or a circle around the area you want to search. “There is still a lot of room for innovation inside of search and inside of these kinds of apps,” said Seth in an interview earlier this week in which he outlined again the recent Yahoo strategy that focuses more on context, location and relevant content than just search boxes. Raghavan also noted that despite the pending outsourcing of search technology to Microsoft (MSFT) in the huge search and advertising deal Yahoo struck with the software giant, Yahoo could still compete in both user experience and relevance. He had better be right, since new stats from comScore (SCOR) show continued declines for Yahoo in search, compared with gains for Microsoft’s Bing search service.