When you buy something on eBay, don't use it, and re-post it for sale, that's, uh, ReBay, right? Now eBay itself is trying that tactic, divesting some trinkets it picked up on a mad shopping spree. Explains Download Squad: "A few years ago eBay went on a buying spree and started snatching up companies ranging from Skype to StumbleUpon. While it made plenty of sense for eBay to acquire PauPal, a company many eBay users were already using to facilitate financial transactions, Skype and StumbleUpon seemed like odd fits." Yes, the 2007 acquisition of content-discovery site StumbleUpon for $75 million inspired head scratching. "I don't quite see the connection," Marketing Pilgrim squinted at the time. Well, yeah. Yesterday they said they "realized there were few long-term synergies between the two businesses," and "now you can Stumble outside of the shadow of the mega-corporate overlords at eBay," says ReadWriteWeb," as StumbUp's original founders have bought their company back. "Forehead smack," says Marketing Pilgrim.

Did Amazon purposely strip the sales rankings from nearly 60,000 gay and lesbian, erotic, romance, and other "adult" titles? Over the weekend, Mark R. Probst reported that "sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books" on April 10 and then hundreds of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their rankings. An Amazon Advantage customer service rep told him, "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude 'adult' material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature." The blogosphere and Twitter erupted, with hashtag #amazonfail becoming the top-ranked topic. "Users then began to hunt for books that Amazon considered 'adult,' and came up with some pretty weird results, including Heather Has Two Mommies, Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography, and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room," reports Jezebel.