While a lot of investor focus has been on the executive turmoil at Yahoo recently, the real attention will soon be turning on its third-quarter earnings report two weeks from now.

That’s on October 19, with a conference call after the markets close, an event that big Yahoo (YHOO) investors are telling BoomTown will be under a great deal of scrutiny.

Not just to assess the numbers and their direction, but to listen to the kind of explanation CEO Carol Bartz will give Wall Street for all the management upheaval.

Will she discount it–as she has cavalierly before–as meaningless, despite the fact that a big chunk of its media and sales leadership has bolted to much greener pastures?

Also of interest, according to several major Yahoo investors I have spoken to in recent days:

What’s the plan going forward to spur serious growth?

What will differentiate Yahoo’s business from rivals?

What more is on the road map presented by Chief Product Officer Blake Irving at a recent Yahoo event?

Of course, most of all, Bartz will be pressed on the results themselves, especially if revenues remain as flat as last quarter’s.

The kicking-in search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT) should provide some relief on the cost side in the quarters ahead, for improved earnings, although Wall Street is looking for signs of significant innovation and product growth to give the stock some lift.

Also, in the shadows, is the stability of the tenure of Bartz, whose contract with Yahoo runs out in 18 months, as well as swirl about various takeover and acquisition scenarios.

According to numerous sources, with increasing outside pressure to act, several members of the board are beginning to contemplate a replacement for Bartz, although none has acted.

Said one person close to the situation: “There is no one powerful board member, leaving each director feeling isolated, so it’s stasis.”

I don’t expect them to move much either, given just how asleep at the wheel Yahoo’s directors have been over the last several years in the wake of even more pronounced crises.

“They’re frozen,” said one frustrated investor who has been in touch with Yahoo board members recently. “And they don’t want to make any admission of failure, since they have barely skated away from past mistakes.”

Those are certainly harsh words, but they are common and increasing among investors who are now clearly riveted again on the tribulations of the Silicon Valley icon.

Whether the company can turn that around sooner than later–we’re all waiting to see the earnings shoe to drop to find out.

Yahoo said it has hired former Microsoft exec Blake Irving (pictured here) as its chief product officer.

Reporting directly to CEO Carol Bartz, Yahoo (YHOO) said in a statement, Irving will “lead the company’s products organization, which is responsible for the vision, strategy, design and development of Yahoo!’s global consumer and advertiser product portfolio.”

In other words, the exec many think the company desperately needs to spur innovation.

Irving replaces Ari Balogh, who announced last week he is leaving the company as of June 3.

Balogh was also CTO, but Yahoo did not say who would get that title.

In related news, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Labs as chief scientist, will now report directly to Bartz.

The Yahoo announcement confirms a post BoomTown wrote last week about the company’s effort to hire Irving, a longtime Microsoft (MSFT) exec whose last job there was corporate VP of its Windows Live Platform group.

He left the software giant several years ago to spend time with his family and had been teaching at Pepperdine University.

Irving had been at Microsoft for 15 years, always commuting to its Redmond, Wash., headquarters.

According to his Facebook page, Irving now lives in laid-back San Luis Obispo, midway between Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

Sources said after time off, Irving had recently become eager to re-engage in the Internet sector.

Yahoo has long wanted to hire Irving, many said. And in nabbing him, the timing is fortuitous, as the company is in the midst of launching its massive search and online advertising partnership with Microsoft.

The hiring also stems the tide of Yahoo’s exec exodus. Balogh’s parting is one of many among top Yahoo execs recently. Ad sales head Joanne Bradford departed the company to join Demand Media, while longtime tech exec Ash Patel said he would not return from a sabbatical he took last year.

Here’s Irving’s post on his own hire on Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog:

Yodeling Hello to Yahoo!

As the newest Yahoo! employee, at the risk of being highly corny, I’m delighted to yodel my first purple-hued shout-out to the 600 million people and tens of thousands of advertisers and publishers who enjoy Yahoo!’s products every day.

Some of you might ask why anyone would say goodbye to surfing and cycling the Central Coast of California or travelling the globe with their family to take on the job of leading products and technology at Yahoo! My answer’s pretty easy–meet just some of the brilliant people at Yahoo! that want to change the world, and then scan the amazing list of leading products around the globe these people have delivered at scale. When I think about what this company has meant to anyone who has used the Internet, worked in the Internet industry, or wanted to reach people across the world, there is simply none better.

From wildly popular services like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr and Yahoo!’s mobile sites and apps, to Yahoo!’s best-in-class content properties like Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, to many, many other great products across the world, Yahoo!’s product portfolio continues to be the envy of the industry. Those incredible services and their respective audiences bring tremendous value for advertisers, which is why Yahoo! serves up 10 billion ads across its network every day and is the #1 publisher of online display advertising. How can anyone not want to be a part of that?

And that’s just what consumers and advertisers see from the outside. Inside Yahoo!, there’s technological and scientific brilliance everywhere you look. With 500 patents, one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, and top scientific talent across computer science, machine learning, economics and social sciences, I’m awed at the caliber of people I’m going to be working with. The intellectual horsepower doesn’t stop there–I’m looking forward to working with some of the smartest and best-in-class talent around the world in marketing, advertising sales, partnerships, programming, service engineering and operations. The commitment Yahoos have shown over the years to delivering the best experience to both consumers and advertisers is one of the key things that attracted me here. We’re in the business of delivering bespoke experiences to our consumers, partners and advertisers and I’m looking forward to working with all of you to build on that reality.

This week marks an exciting new journey for me personally, and I’m thrilled to be sharing my experiences and background with the world class people at Yahoo! We have big opportunities, as well as big challenges ahead of us, and I’m getting ready to dive in and work with this great team to make Yahoo! even more central to daily online life than it has been over the past decade and a half.

My first day in the office will be May 17th and I can’t wait to get started. Stay tuned for more as I get settled and dig in with my new team.

‘Nuff said.

–By Blake Irving, Future Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!

And here’s the official press release:

Blake Irving Joins Yahoo! as Chief Product Officer

Chief Scientist Position, Held by Prabhakar Raghavan, Elevated to Report to CEO Bartz

Sunnyvale, California–April 19, 2010–Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) today announced the appointment of Blake Irving as Chief Product Officer. In related news, Prabhakar Raghavan will continue to lead innovation efforts at Yahoo! Labs as Chief Scientist. Both Irving and Raghavan will report directly to Carol Bartz, CEO. This new leadership will focus on speeding key inputs and decision making into product strategy and direction.

Ari Balogh, current head of products and technology, will be leaving the company on June 3 for personal reasons and will work closely with Irving to ensure a smooth transition. Irving will assume the position on May 17.

“Blake brings to Yahoo! genuine large scale Internet expertise from a mature company known for world-class technology. In addition, Prabhakar has invaluable technological insights and expertise that I look forward to having my executive team hear more directly,” said Bartz. “With leaders like Blake and Prabhakar, I am confident that we will increase technological innovation and deliver against our vision to be the center of people’s online lives.”

“Yahoo! has an impressive product and technology portfolio that has provided unparalleled value to its customers at scale,” said Irving. “I look forward to working with the team to bring forward more unique and highly personal experiences to Yahoo! consumers, deliver on the company’s promise of Science, Art and Scale to Yahoo! advertisers, and develop the amazing talent at the company so we may continue to deliver more and faster innovations to the market.”

As Chief Product Officer, Irving will lead the company’s products organization, which is responsible for the vision, strategy, design and development of Yahoo!’s global consumer and advertiser product portfolio.

Irving was most recently a professor at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management in Malibu, California. In his prior role as corporate vice president of the Windows Live Platform group, Irving led a team of 4,000 to build and operate Microsoft’s Internet-scale services platform, advertiser and developer ecosystem. Irving also held a variety of development and general management positions at Microsoft.

Before joining Microsoft, Irving held development and product marketing management positions at Xerox Corp., Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. and Compaq Computer Corp. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from San Diego State University and a Master’s degree in business administration from Pepperdine University.

Raghavan joined Yahoo! in 2005, and serves as Chief Scientist and head of Yahoo! Labs. Raghavan’s research priorities include text and web mining, and algorithm design. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Raghavan was the chief technology officer at Verity and held a number of technical and managerial positions at IBM Research. He is a consulting professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Association of Computing Machinery. He has co-authored two textbooks on randomized algorithms and information retrieval. Raghavan received his PhD from Berkeley and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.

MySpace has officially announced the appointment of entrepreneur and former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO, as BoomTown reported earlier today.

But the social-networking site also named former Sling Media top exec Jason Hirschhorn as chief product officer in what has become a series of senior management moves at MySpace.

The paidContent Web site first reported on the Hirschhorn appointment earlier this morning.

Besides Sling, which he recently left in a mass departure of top execs, Hirschhorn was also the top digital exec at MTV Networks and was part of the team at Viacom (VIA) that unsuccessfully tried to buy MySpace many years ago.

Both Hirschhorn and Jones, who are already based in Los Angeles, will report to newly named CEO Owen Van Natta, the former COO of Facebook, who replaced MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe last week.

Recently installed News Corp. (NWS) digital head Jon Miller has put in place a trio of well-known Internet execs at the top of MySpace, which has seen its buzz and momentum wane in the face of the huge growth at Facebook.

MySpace’s motto is “A Place for Friends.” But it might very well now be: A place for wandering digital execs.

And expect more top execs to wander away from MySpace too. Once the trio get their bearings, many sources indicate that News Corp., the owner of MySpace, has given Van Natta and his key execs free rein to remake the unit.

There is a lot to fix at the entertainment-, music- and media-heavy site, from a renegotiation with Google (GOOG) over its advertising search deal to goosing traffic to innovating its look and feel.

In addition, MySpace is likely to forge closer tech ties with Silicon Valley, where Facebook is based.

News Corp. already noted that it was in talks with MySpace co-founder and President Tom Anderson about a new role in the company. Also likely to get a major look-see are top execs like sales head Jeff Berman and CTO Aber Whitcomb, as well as a number of others.

To begin, though, the trio will meet the staff of MySpace, more than 1,000 people, in an all-hands event to be held outside of its building in Beverly Hills, Calif., at about 3:30 p.m. today.

Sources tell me there is no space big enough at the HQ to accommodate them, so the courtyard of the building will be used.

BoomTown is in Los Angeles today, by coincidence, but will not be crashing the event, so send interesting tidbits my way.

Here is the full release:

Los Angeles, CA, April 27, 2009–News Corporation today announced an expansion of MySpace’s management team with two key new hires. Michael Jones has been named Chief Operating Officer and Jason Hirschhorn has been named Chief Product Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn will be based in Los Angeles and report to MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Jones has founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a senior vice president and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. Most recently, he was the founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services.

Hirschhorn has led both start-up and established online businesses. Most recently, he was president of Sling Media, Inc.’s Entertainment Group, which created consumer-driven applications and services for the Slingbox device. Previously, he was chief digital officer at MTV Networks, where he oversaw the company’s digital media businesses, products and strategies. Hirschhorn joined MTV Networks following the acquisition of his company, Mischief New Media, which provided interactive services to the entertainment industry.

“Michael’s operational insight and knowledge of the social media market will prove to be a valuable asset as we set out to evolve the MySpace product offering,” said Jon Miller, chief digital officer, News Corporation. “From a product perspective, there’s no better choice than Jason, who is highly regarded as an incredibly talented innovator, media executive and leader, all qualities I know will greatly benefit our team and our users.”

“We were attracted to Michael’s unique background in building and operating successful businesses that fall directly in our sweet spot, and I look forward to leveraging his skill set as we further refine and shape the MySpace vision,” said Mr. Van Natta. “Jason’s reputation for creating compelling consumer experiences that leverage the intersection of technology, design and media is unmatched and we’re excited to have him join us.”

“I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to build upon the successes of the company’s founders and am eager to work with Owen and Jon and the rest of the incredible management team at MySpace as we enter this exciting new phase in the company’s already revered history,” said Mr. Jones. Mr. Hirschhorn continued, “MySpace is one of the most alluring innovations of our time and I am honored to collaborate with Tom Anderson and the rest of the MySpace team to take what is already a stellar product into its next evolution.”

(New Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)