“Who Moved My Cheese” is a best selling book about change. It is a hideous read. When I first saw it, I am not sure which made my stomach turn harder - trying to read it, accepting that someone had paid money for it, or accepting that someone in upper management believed that everyone below him needed to read it.

But I was reminded of it when I read this:

Change is hard.

That is an excerpt from a leaked internal Yahoo! memo from Yahoo! Senior Vice President Brad Garlinghouse, as published on Search Engine Journal. Garlinghouse is calling for big changes at Yahoo!, and among my favorite parts are:

We have lost our passion to win…

Existing business owners must be held accountable for where we find ourselves today - heads must roll…

We need to fundamentally rethink how we organize to win…

There was some discussion about Yahoo! on ThreadWatch last week, and I suggested that maybe when mid-level executives leave Yahoo! for start-ups it is a reflection of their desire to be in on a startup, or a reflection of their lack of commitment to Yahoo! (desire to be somewhere else) and not necesarily a sign of problems at Yahoo. Now it is clear that change is coming down from the top.

Problems at Yahoo? Maybe. I’m not qualified to say. Perhaps the big change came after those mid-level people jumped ship. But that memo is a good read. You didn’t see one like that from Xerox or Digital back in the past, right?

To me, things look very promising for Yahoo when someone sends a memo like that.

In suburban America in the 80’s, everyone had a home bar, and everyone wanted to know everyone else’s drink. You wanted to be able to take a guest aside to the bar and serve him what he liked…make him feel special. The town hall people, the lawyer down the street, the cardiologist that gave out free advice, and of course the ice cream company district manager living next door. I was just a teenager but sometimes running to the Local Liquor Store for somebody’s favorite Tanguerey, or Jim Beam, or Canadian Club was *the* critical task of the day.

Nowadays SEO people meet at bars and restaurants, but they still drink, and that aside meeting is still where the SEO action takes place at major conferences. Oh, sure the sales action and intros largely take place on the conference floor and exhibit hall, but the SEO action is at the bar.

In this case the lawyer has been swapped out for a domain guru or semantics expert, the town hall guy has been replaced by the link meisters and directory kings, and the ice cream salesman? Well, let’s just say that these days he’s selling luncheon meat.

The question remains: What do you drink?

Threadwatch published a post from Todd Sims of Business.com, with Tom stating that Business.com is removing the nofollow attributes from all Business.com listings effective immediately. I tend to agree with some of the TW comments; that business probably dropped quite a bit when they added those nofollows, creating concern within Business.com about the value of the use of that attribute. Why muddy the waters if the gains are not sufficient to justify the risk?

Let’s just say rel=nofollow is yet another Google beta program. Do you adopt things when they are still in beta? Should you?

Business.com’s use of nofollow was reported previously:

• Business.com gets competitive with nofollow attribute
• Business.com use of nofollow clarified. Has Google spoken?