Raise Your Marketing IQ

Yahoo’s board of directors is meeting tonight over Microsoft search partnership — The Wall Street Journal reports that another meeting over a potential search advertising partnership happened today.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos apologizes for erasing customers’ e-books — Last week, the company remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from the Kindles of customers to whom Amazon had accidentally sold copies to which Amazon didn’t have e-rights. Bezos said at the start of the company’s earnings call, “Our solution to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” TechCrunch has more context on the story.

The Associated Press creates a news registry to protect its content — The AP has struggled to find a way to prevent its oh-so-usable reporting from being run for free by websites. “The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used,” says the AP’s report on itself.

Autodesk offers free training for unemployed potential designers — The Autodesk Assistance Program offers free training in Autodesks’s AutoCAD, Revit, AutoDesk Inventor Professional, and AutoCAD Civil 3D software, all of which are industry standard tools for 2D and 3D design professionals. There’s also a discount on these pricey programs for employers who hire people who’ve completed the . Autodesk’s website explains the details.

Google announces comics-based custom themes — Peanuts, Batman, Iron Man, Superman, Transmetropolitan, Garfield, Popeye, Renee French, Hellboy, Ziggy, TOKYOPOP, and another 40 themes for Google are now available for iGoogle members. The company licensed the images so that users can have them for free, but it’s a clever hook to get users to login as iGoogle users. Google search princess Marissa Mayer blogs about the new themes.

The New York Times swept Knight-Batten awards for innovations in journalism — The Gray Lady’s quaterly profits dropped 42 percent from last year, but the paper dominate this year’s prestigious Knight-Battens. A half dozen NYT newsroom and technology department projects, from the Times’ Document Reader for posting documents that go with a story, to Living with Less, a series of video and audio portraits of how the current recession has affected people, were deemed “excellent, innovative journalism, news and information” by the Knight Foundation.