"I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book."
—Groucho Marx

Digitial Media Wire reports that LinkedIn just scored $53 million in a new round of funding that places the company’s value at a billion bucks.

LinkedIn claims 23 million members, but how many of those are active members, as in accessing the site at least once a week? (As opposed to the millions who undoubtedly created an account and never went to the site again.) Let’s say 40 percent, which I think is very generous.

That would mean 9.2 million active members, which in turn would mean each member is worth about $109. That’s not too bad.

If LinkedIn can take themselves to the next level with a real vision, for example by developing some exclusive partnerships with premium brands like Harvard Business Review for editorial and the Ladders for job hunting, then they really might become the ultimate business destination.

(And when you figure that 12 months of HBR and Ladders runs about $260 combined, that $109 is looking pretty good.)

If they’re gonna use that $53 million to keep the site pretty much as is, albeit with a few tweaks, and focus on shoving ads into the existing structure of the site … well, they might as well call it a day.

AdAge runs some numbers on the search deal between Google and Yahoo! and determines that Google wins again … to the tune of about a billion dollars.

Takeaway for marketers: Brace yourself — this deal might mean higher costs for your paid search program.

I don’t know what the numbers for the U.S. Open Webcast were yesterday afternoon, but they were probably huge. It was a great playoff, some say the best golf has ever seen. Odds are a lot of office doors were closed so the occupants could *ahem* "focus on paperwork."

The Webcast itself was a little uneven, occasionally freezing or having trouble keeping the video synched up with the audio (I was watching it on FiOS). There were several times that the picture was doing something akin to fast-forwarding in order to catch up to the sound.

My initial attempts to log in to the broadcast took me six tries before I could successfully connect with a working stream — each of those six times, of course, the American Express commercial that preceded the Webcast linkup played flawlessly.

Even so, NBC and the USGA did a tremendous job blending the Web with their televised coverage with a remarkable golf event. The only thing that could have made it significantly better, imho, would have been for Rocco to have made one more putt than he did.

Word of mouth is one thing. But when that word of mouth is analogous to the entire kindergarten schoolyard pointing at you and saying, "he’s a creep and he has cooties and stay away from him no matter what!" … well, that’s something else entirely. Clearly it’s a distinction that Spirit Airlines needs to learn.

Takeaway for marketers: It’s not just about creating buzz, it’s about creating the right kind of buzz. Duh.