Combs, aka Diddy, aka Puffy, was inexplicably put forward by AOL as a company icon in the midst of its stock market re-debut, as evidenced in Kara Swisher's video for All Things D, excerpted above. The producer and entrepreneur does have a presence on AOL Music, so maybe that's why he was posing with AOL execs last night at a party on the New York Stock Exchange, the beating heart of Wall Street. "2010 is going to be an AOL year," Combs told the financey crowd. "Good luck tomorrow," the first day of trading following AOL's spinoff from Time Warner.

Shares of AOL closed down half a percent. Hopefully Combs can share more helpful words with the content-obsessed internet conglomerate on the art of creating profitable crowd pleasers in a notoriously crowded genre. Are the blog game and rap game really so different?

Armstrong, the former Google advertising chief (pictured), jettisoned some top lieutenants from AOL, the internet conglomerate, last month. Beyond that, he's believed to be planning major job cuts as part of a sweeping reorganization of the company. "AOL is not going to change itself by incremental movements," Armstrong recently told PaidContent. Asked if this meant "large cuts," he talked about going "deep into the employee organization... to come up with ways to structure the company... I would expect announcements about that by early next year."

Early next year would mean just after the spinoff from Time Warner, assuming it goes forward as expected late this year. An AOLer who attended a recent internal "Town Hall" meeting on the restructuring, dubbed Project Everest, confirmed the layoffs are planned for post-spinoff.

One explanation we've heard for that timing is that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes didn't want layoffs taking place while AOL was part of his company. That makes some sense — layoffs typically carry a price tag, and Time Warner presumably doesn't want to take the hit for a move that will benefit another company over the long term. Time Warner isn't taking on debt as part of the transaction, our AOL tipster said, which jibes with the media conglomerate's statements that it is AOL that might load up on debt as part of the spinoff.

But a delayed deep restructuring means uncertainty for investors considering what to do with AOL shares in the earliest days of tradubg, which in turn means a potentially depressed price. A weak re-debut for AOL shares would not bode well for a company that has already had more than its share of struggles. Then again, if anyone can sell uncertainty, it's a consummate salesman like Armstrong.

UPDATE: 3:38 pm ET: Post updated with comments from an AOLer.

Armstrong, the former golden boy of Google's advertising side, was hired just this past spring and has long been expected to initiate a massive restructuring. In his memo, he discusses a strategy session that nailed down where, exactly, the company is going. He also confirms his first two firings, reported previously by Business Insider: longtime company execs Kim Partoll, the COO, and Local, Mapping and Search boss John Kannapell. Both were hired shortly after AOL's disastrous merger with Time Warner.



He also mentions a "Project Everest:"

We have a strong strategy and we need to be laser focused on execution. We are planning another video update next week with a progress report on Project Everest, and I look forward to seeing you all then.

We look forward to that video, too! Full memo:

Amid his company's spinoff from Time Warner, CEO Tim Armstrong has been focusing AOL more on online content — blogs, videos, that sort of thing. One of his first announcements: a deal to distribute "purpose-driven" Web videos featuring "animated versions of Warren Buffett, Martha Stewart at age 10, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, and the late Carl Sagan," PaidContent reports.

In Secret Millionaire's Club, Buffet will mentor a group of kids on how to blow 31 percent of market value and a AAA credit rating in one year using derivatives and writing risky catastrophic insurance policies. In Little Martha, meanwhile, Martha Stewart will run an event-planning company from a treehouse, seeded with profits from insider trading. Sounds like fun for the whole family!

Consider, first, that AOL is buying Armstrong out of what sounds like a dud company — the sort of startup that can devour an investor's equity entirely.

Armstrong's Patch is a "hyperlocal" news website, mixing reporting from its own journalists with contributions from volunteers. Though it's had precious few successes, citizen journalism remains notoriously tricky from an editorial standpoint, to say nothing of profitability. And Patch has been ambushed with some formidable competition: The New York Times rolled out its own local blogging effort in the exact three communities where Patch debuted.

For this, AOL paid around $10 million, helping Armstrong recoup his otherwise imperiled seed investment?

Then there's the question of AOL's real interest. It's far more likely the company bought Patch to nail down Armstrong than out of some sudden resurgence of interest in local news (as Kara Swisher of All Things D notes, AOL had already been down this road with Digital City and CityGuide).

AOL wanted to hire Armstrong from Google just a couple of months before AOL detached from Time Warner. There would have been negotiations. And what better time for savvy salesman Armstrong to mention his growing interest in Patch than when AOL hoped to focus his attention elsewhere? "Distracted by Patch? We'll take it off your hands for you."

That sort of arrangement wouldn't be particularly transparent for AOL shareholders, who should know where compensation ends and strategic investments begin. But presumably Armstrong can lead them to the same conclusion as his former bosses: That he's worth every penny.

In retrospect, AOL's deal to acquire — and then be run by — Time Warner marked the end of a century when old media conglomerates were at their peak. The merger, valued at $182 billion when it was announced, was the largest in U.S. history. It is also arguably the most disastrous in history. The combined value of the two companies — both inflated by the dot-com bubble — was $350 billion. Today, before the spin-off goes through, the whole shebang sports a market cap of just under $28 billion.

Now that the struggling old media company is parting ways with its fast-shrinking internet toy, the media's hand-wringing over the deal nine years ago looks absurdly hubristic in retrospect.

Here are some quotes from early 2000, after the deal was announced (and about a year before it was consummated):

• New York Times: A "merger of tree-snapping behemoths... the Godzilla of the Internet... wed the King Kong of content. It is a natural time for the other denizens of the jungle to wonder what the future will hold for the colossal couple and the world they inhabit."
  
• USA Today: "It's one of those rare events that seems to change the world overnight... We're shocked... "
  
• Newsweek: "AOL Time Warner will be unchallenged in its online customer base and hold vast cable-television assets."
• Regional telco SBC Communications, as quoted in CBS Marketwatch: "The merger will establish, through a web of equity and contractual interests, one interlocking conglomerate with control over both the high-speed pipes consumers use to connect to the Internet and the content they access once they're online."
• Salon, April Fool's Day: "AOL Time Warner announced Friday that it had acquired France."

There were some pessimists; a columnist named Paul Krugman wrote that only time would tell about the wisdom of the deal, and that it's possible " some big businessmen have just made a very big mistake."

Instead of fearsome tentacles everywhere, Time Warner is now left with the old-line business it was in before the 2000 deal. Except those assets — cable networks, a movie studio, magazines — now face more obstacles to growth than they did eight years ago.

AOL chief Tim Armstrong, the former Google sales chief, finally has his own company to run; it remains to be seen whether he can reverse AOL's steadily declining advertising revenues. But it's Time Warner that's left with the tougher job: Proving media conglomerates can still post impressive growth amid the rise of online media consumption.

Nikesh Arora joined Google's London office four years ago. In April, he was tapped to replace global sales chief and Google "business founder" Omid Kordestani, who left with $1.4 billion in net worth amid company cutbacks.

In the intervening month, we hear, quite a few Google execs have come to regard Arora with distaste, cementing his reputation for sharp elbows and a sometimes unfriendly approach — at least among many of the notoriously-pampered Googlers. (That's Arora in the picture above, seizing the "Prince of Asturias Award for Comunication and Humanities" at an event held in Spain by Google co-founder Larry Page in October 2008.)

The upshot? A dark nickname within the Google empire: "Darth Vader."

Perhaps being disagreeable to the Google rank and file is precisely the point, as far as Arora is concerned. Even those Googlers who dislike the executive are said to respect his sales acumen, we are told. Which makes sense: Overt assholes are rare in Google's culture. So Nikesh must be good at bringing in the bucks if he's nasty.

And there could hardly be a better time to trade pleasantries for cash.

(Still, we'd love to hear details of Arora's behavior — from detractors and supporters alike.)

(UPDATE: Comments enabled; they were off for several hours due to a tech glitch.)

I still remember the day I called you up and tried to recruit you to Valleywag — only to learn that that sneaky rapscallion Nick Denton had beaten me to the punch by one whole day in offering you the night shift at Gawker. It all worked out in the end — and perhaps better than I could have imagined back in 2007. But the main lesson I take away from that is that you can get Denton to do pretty much whatever you want if you're patient enough.

Denton, who has a weakness for idle truisms, likes to say that gossip is a young man's game. But you're old enough to remember the first dotcom bubble, and how it popped. That's going to be key in the next few years. We may escape a depression, but Silicon Valley is facing a reckoning nonetheless. Too much venture capital chased too few idea for far too long — and a buoyant economy can no longer hide the startup factory's mistakes.

The biggest mistake you can make is getting too close to your Valley sources and fall for their groupthink in order to ingratiate yourself. (You know how I've scolded you for gullibly buying the hype that Twitter is an amazing source of real-time news. Okay, perhaps it was — for five seconds, before the blowhards, spammers, and self-promoters found it.) At least your schooling will help you remain an outsider: As a Berkeley grad, you'll have an instinctive dislike for the Valley's Stanford in-crowd.

At the same time, don't forget that your years living, studying, and working in the Bay Area give you a better understanding of your beat than anyone can have from 3,000 miles away. Gabriel and Nick, though well-intentioned, have the Manhattan media habit of confusing proximity with relevance. Gawker is much more than New York now — and Valleywag's unique place therein must be firmly grounded in northern California's shaky soil.

Remember: Love is far more powerful than hate. Keep a clear-eyed passion for the Valley. Most tech reporters here secretly loathe their subjects, but try to disguise it with a supine gladhandery as they beg for scoops about new startup website features. They hate themselves and the people they write about. Sad, right? By loving the Valley, you can write about it more honestly than any of them. Just prepare to have your heart broken again, and again, and again. To truly love something, you must love it with all its failings.

For example, the Valley's Alice-in-Wonderland economics — why is Twitter worth more than most startups precisely because it has no revenues to speak of? But the thing you must love most about Silicon Valley — the part of the story the local press corps always skips over in favor of buzzwords, punditry, and lazy analysis — is its people.

The Valley's story is not one of chips and code. It is not a tale of technology. It is the always-running tragicomedy of the people who make technology.

Here are a few characters to watch. I hope it helps — but I can't wait to see who you add to the list.

Marissa Mayer Valleywag's first story remains its best. The public face of Google, Mayer also runs search, the only business that matters there. The cupcake frosting of her girly image — one she assiduously advances at every opportunity — may humanize the otherwise robotic computer scientist. But it is a distraction. The real question to ask about Mayer: Does her spreadsheet-ridden management style scale to new problems beyond search? Are her strengths now turning into limitations?

Mark Zuckerberg Ignore the nerd façade. Facebook's 25-year-old CEO is headstrong and ruthless. Here's the grand irony of Zuckerberg's revolutionary venture: He claims to be all about openness and sharing. But his imperious, my-way-or-the-highway management style has created a fractious culture of dishonesty, delusion, and disillusionment at the social network. His underlings either learn to say things they don't believe, or they move on. This is why Sheryl Sandberg is exactly the wrong COO for Zuckerberg. The veteran of the Clinton Administration has forgotten her Google training and reverted to Washington-player form, where staying on message is all that counts. Facebook's best hope is that Zuckerberg learns from his mistakes — but first he has to recognize them as mistakes.

Carol Bartz Yahoo's CEO swears like a sailor. At last, a boss who has found the right language to describe Yahoo's plight! Bartz brings a refreshing frankness to Yahoo. But the already demoralized troops she inherited will need to start seeing results. Otherwise, Valleywag will continue to be a steady recipient of leaks from Sunnyvale.

Elon Musk The CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX is living the geek high life, playing with fast cars, rocket ships, and other people's money. It's wonderful that Musk has realized even a small part of his childhood fantasies. But he risks destroying his dreams by refusing to reconcile them with reality. Factcheck everything Musk says. For example, was he actually running either Zip2 or PayPal, the previous dotcom successes he likes to cite in his bio, when they were sold?

Owen Van Natta Everyone is going to give MySpace's new CEO a pass, because the so-called "social portal" is so clearly troubled. If the former Facebook executive succeeds in a turnaround, it will be viewed as an astonishing achievement; if he fails, people will say no one could save MySpace. That's not fair. Hold his feet to the fire, and judge this disturbingly tan rock-star boss like anyone else on the list.

Peter Thiel Thiel, the PayPal cofounder, likes to brag about how he recruits only the best brains from the best schools to work at Clarium Capital, his hedge fund. Oh, really? Take a look at their résumés on LinkedIn. Like so many of this outspokenly harebrained libertarian's theses, the claim sounds good on paper but doesn't stand up to inspection. Valleywag, alone in Silicon Valley, can take a keen look at Thiel's rhetoric without being dazzled by his inflated wealth.

Tim Armstrong Like Van Natta at MySpace, Armstrong, a Google golden boy now charged with running AOL, will be enjoying a honeymoon. Don't worry: There are plenty of disgruntled AOLers who will gladly help you break up the lovefest.

Jimmy Wales Remind me: What does Wikipedia's founder actually do to earn his keep, besides give speeches? In all this time, I was never able to figure that out. Maybe you can!

Eric Schmidt When did Google's CEO turn into such a raging egomaniac? When the blogosphere was the only corner of the Internet that criticized him, he dismissed it as a "cesspool." But now everyone from Hollywood to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission is looking askance at his online empire's practices. "Don't be evil" has turned into "don't get caught." He will, though. Be ready when he does.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google's wonder twins have achieved geek nirvana, creating a cloistered campus with free food, lava lamps, and exercise balls to spare. They have a fleet of jets to transport them to rocket launches or rendezvous with Richard Branson and Bono. They've even managed to get married and reproduce. Just one question: Are they still sane? Were they ever?

There are many people who will help you — many of the same people who helped me so much, I hope. They include:

• Nick Denton, for putting up with three years of playing hard to get — and then putting up with much more besides.
• Brian Lam, Choire Sicha, Noah Robischon and Lockhart Steele, for tag-teaming me into taking the job.
• Gabriel Snyder, for expertly steering Valleywag into Gawker's welcoming arms.
• All the Valleywaggers: Paul Boutin, Nick Douglas, Megan McCarthy, Tim Faulkner, Mary Jane Irwin, Jordan Golson, Nicholas Carlson, Jackson West, Melissa Gira Grant, and Tim Woolery. You guys, we've been through so much together!
• Richard Blakeley: We made sweet Photoshop magic together.
• Everyone at Gawker Media: How much do I love you? Far more than just five milligrams.
• Sarah Lacy, Kara Swisher, and Peter Kafka: My peers and fellow purveyors of Valley gossip, you constantly inspired me.
• Countless sources, tipsters, and fellow scribes: Please understand that I esteem you none the less for not naming you here. In fact, your continued anonymity is the best sign of my abiding affection.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Good luck, Ryan. I'll be reading eagerly.

Don't screw it up.

Yours,

Owen
The Valleywag

(Photos by Brian Solis and Scott Beale/Laughing Squid)

Dennis,

The NYC Googlers in the Ad Sales department are grateful for your arrival. Wow, you could not have come sooner. The office was falling apart. Armstrong was running his many businesses and promoting the most incompetent early Googlers to high ranking positions. Please take note of a few problems.

* The vast majority of your team managers have NO direct advertising sales experience. Many come from agencies but those of us who have actually worked on the outside know that very few people successfully transition from agency to sales.
* What is the scoop with this HOI position? Are you kidding me? These people are quintessential middle management. Call in McKinsey amnd see what they think. Most HOIS with the exception of Dan Schock have never sold. Pavelko dresses terribly and has the single worst breath.
* What do the Vertical heads do? Have you ever heard some of them speak at conferences? So now you have the Vertical Head and the HOI and the team Manager....
* Let's discuss the team managers again. Are you kidding? Do you see the problem?
* Now you have gone and taken your BEST salespeople and put them on a display team. Have you heard how they have been treated? They actually no how to build relationshipss, sell and entertain but they are now overwhelmed by middle managers. What happened to the good old days of risk taking. Now it is death by meeting with spread sheets and bs.
* Please fix this mess sire. Please.
* BTW, what is with the stuttering Castelli. He was the Publisher at 3rd tier magazines but now he is heading the east coast? Have you heard him speak?He cannot get a word out. He has no visibility and barely understands the products. Have him take you through a deep dive.
* Agency? Are you kidding me? Do you see the problems? How many Ivy educated people does it take to call a customer? Trust me, customers are annoyed. They are not getting service they deserve. OSO is pathetic and GMS has not a clue. Every other major company has salespeople who know how to call the agency and customer. At Google, we discuss it first.

HELP us little man.

NYC

Armstrong's first day is April 7, but according to our source, he's had his eye on the startup for a while: "He's apparently loved it ever since Google, and it would make AOL instantly cool again, since we don't have anything good except for TMZ."

It's not clear if there are any talks, just rumors of Armstrong's desire to get his hands on Twitter. He shares that apparent interest with his former colleagues at Google, who are in the process of getting collectively shamed into some kind of Twitter partnership or acquisition by Silicon Valley's Twitter-happy punditocracy. In that field, though, Armstrong has an advantage: When it comes to buying things merely for their perceived coolness, AOL is absolutely shameless.

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.

The Local, a new Times blog, has two reporters and an editor covering two neighborhoods in Brooklyn and three New Jersey towns. Jim Schachter, the Times's editor for "digital initiatives," tells the Nieman Journalism Lab that the site will never make money on its own:

If every single person who lives in Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Maplewood, Millburn, and South Orange came to these sites every day and made one impression, that would be about 120,000 impressions a day. It is barely enough to create a ripple in a pond and not enough to be profitable.... If you, for each site, have one full-time New York Times reporter and half of a editor, I don't think there is any way that this could ever pencil out as profitable.

But that's not the point, Schachter says: The Times is trialing the sites in order to build a software platform for other community sites, which local bloggers, possibly unaffiliated with the Times, will run. (It's worth noting that the New York Times Co. is an investor in Automattic, the San Francisco-based maker of WordPress, which Times blogs like The Local run on.)

That explains why the Times is targeting the exact same towns that Patch, a local-blogging startup backed by Google sales executive Tim Armstrong, chose for its debut. Impossibly vain Maplewood bloggers think that the interest reflects the unique qualities of their hometown. Nonsense. The Times wants to squeeze out a startup before it gets established on its home turf.

Both Patch and the Times are really aiming to be a platform for blogging — because, honestly, who wants to pay writers these days?

Of course, the hyperlocal hypercompetition will likely end up killing everyone, leading people to give up on making money from the "placeblogosphere," as Schachter neologizes it, for good. The only person who wins: Noisome media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who is simultaneously advising the Times and Patch.

Armstrong, Google's top U.S. sales executive, has invested in Patch, a company which promises to develop "hyperlocal" websites focusing on news coverage specific to their communities. He's putting in money from his own fortune — money which he made through Google's lucrative IPO — but one must imagine New York Times executives view Patch as a stalking horse for the search engine.

Hence the new Times feature called The Local. Besides Patch's three towns, The Local will also cover two Brooklyn neighborhoods. It will be entertaining to hear the Times spin on why it picked Patch's turf to launch The Local. Milburn's attractive demographics? South Orange's thriving cultural scene? No, the Times is waging an old-fashioned newspaper war — on the still-unfamiliar turf of the Internet, against a Google millionaire. This will be by far more interesting than anything else that happens in Maplewood.

Armstrong, the handsome and high-ranking Google executive who runs the company's advertising operations — that is, the actual business that generates cash — in both North America and South America, is backing a startup called Patch through his personal investment fund. The startup aims to run local websites in small communities. Armstrong's biography on the site makes it sound like this is more of a cause than a cash-in attempt:

Polar Capital Group, Tim Armstrong's private investment company, is an investor in Patch. Polar invested in Patch because Tim believes that Patch should be in every community in America, and wants Patch in his town. He wants to read local news stories done by journalists, make sure that local government is transparent and accountable, see all the ways he can give back to his community, and have his town be as interesting and alive online as it is offline. Tim is also a believer in American ingenuity and knows that products like Patch will help deliver a commercially viable way for communities to support the important work of local journalists, institutions, governments, and businesses. Tim works at Google and his family lives in a Connecticut patch.

The site is presently limited to three suburban towns in New Jersey — South Orange, Maplewood, and Milburn. But the company, based in New York, already has 20 employees.

Will this save journalism? A form of it, perhaps. The big-city dailies have been retrenching from the suburbs for years. But Patch is hiring one journalist per town, to cover local news with a heavy emphasis on charities. That's exactly the kind of starter journalism job desperate grads take straight our of J-school, and work like heck to escape as fast as they can. The difference, in this Google-funded scenario, is that there won't be anywhere else to go from there.

And why is Google letting Armstrong freelance as a startup investor? Google's compliance cops have already greenlighted his investment in Associated Content, an ostensibly independent startup which lives off Google ads. Perhaps it's because his startup experiments may well help his employer.

Could Patch be a Trojan horse for Google to get into the local news business? Google has struggled with local advertising, partly because there's not enough obviously local content online to advertise against. Google would spark a massive outcry if it got into the news business directly. But through a trusted proxy like Armstrong, it can keep a close eye — and move in once Armstrong has discovered his "commercially viable way."

That's precisely why Facebook hired her as COO — to address similar problems, as Facebook's advertisers have grown more and more noisy in their complaints about the site's broken billing systems. How cleverly devious of Armstrong: He gets to puff his chest out and claim he's solving Google's problems, while quietly casting the blame on an internal rival who departed for the competition.

Some YouTube advertisers, for example, had to pore over three separate legal contracts. Before Google salespeople around the country could propose certain deals to YouTube advertisers, they first had to get approval to do so from a temporary worker in California. And lacking a fully automated billing system for YouTube, Google staffers had to calculate some bills manually.

I'm sure Google would rather just automate the process and provide a link to the relevant documents — because it's apparent any business system at the company involving humans is at least as inefficient as it is anywhere else, if not more so. Problem is, sponsors looking to spend big on a campaign want to shake hands on a deal with a media buyer who's wined and dined them and let the lawyers and secretaries hammer out the boilerplate, not click through Web forms before paying for a seven-figure buy with Google Checkout.

• Former Fox Interactive boss Ross Levinsohn and AOL CEO Jon Miller, now partners at Velocity Interactive, seem to come as a pair. Levinsohn is best known for acquiring MySpace for Fox Interactive and quitting the company after it wouldn't buy Digg. But Levinsohn is also known for bullying entrepreneurs — once, so badly that renowned angel investor Ron Conway reportedly "flew off the handle" at him. In some quarters and in Jason Calacanis's heart, Miller gets credit turning around AOL. But like any exec, Miller has his detractors at AOL and they came out of the woodwork when he was fired last year. One described him as
  

  An executive over 4 years that put more incompetent people in high-places (e.g., McKinley) while firing (Govern) and letting reams of talented folks (e.g., Kotay, list-o-long) leave that were passionate and—at least—somewhat competent, and were actually trying to foster some core innovation and synergy.

• OpenTable’s CEO Jeff Jordan is on Yahoo shareholders and board members' wishlist, just like he was on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's list to become COO of that company before it settled on Sheryl Sandberg. An eBay veteran, Jordan was thought to be in line for Meg Whitman's job until he took over as OpenTable's CEO in 2007. His reputation as a "product Nazi" led Valleywag to endorse him for Yahoo's top job way back in November 2006.
• Tim Armstrong heads up Google's ad sales force and the unit is perhaps respectably profitable enough for Yahoo shareholders and board members to include him on their list. We wonder, however, if the board knows about Armstrong's involvement with sketchy search engine spam company Associated Content.
• Why wouldn't Yahoo's board and shareholders want Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson for the company's top job? Ever since Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a bid to acquire the company on February 1, no one's given more thought to running Yahoo. Johnson's even written several memos on the topic — showing great ability to include exclamation marks after the company's name while still respecting the need for capital letters.

I don't think we would comment on it specifically, I think that's between those companies ... We compete against both of those companies, we also partner with both of those companies. We'll be as interested in anybody in what the outcomes are.

The Internet is a big healthy environment for us and I think we feel confident in our business and in the decisions we're making. We're more nervous about making sure we stay focused ourselves rather than what the competition does.