We haven't heard much about the Google Jet, lately — the converted 767 airline that serves as Larry Page and Sergey Brin's party palace in the sky. But we were intrigued by this tip: "Could have sworn I saw the Google Jet yesterday sitting on the tarmac at Moffett Field at about 6:30 p.m. How convenient for the boys!" Convenient, indeed, since Moffett Field is practically adjacent to Google's Mountain View headquarters. But last we checked, the airport was owned by the government and run by NASA, and not, as far as we're aware, available for private use. Google, however, has had a deal since 2005 to develop offices and housing at the NASA site. Could landing rights for Page's and Brin's private jet be part of the deal?

Marcy Simon, Valleywag has learned, doesn't just have a coveted desk and a phone line in Google's cramped New York offices. She also has a seemingly hot assignment: PR for the yet-to-be-launched Googlephone. All this, simply for serving as married Google CEO Eric Schmidt's piece on the side? Yes, that's right: Schmidt's girlfriend, despite having no experience in wireless or telecom, is handling the launch of one of Google's most-whispered-about initiatives. Why the Duchess of West Chelsea, as Valleywag has dubbed Simon, is handling this, and not say, David Krane, Google's telecom-savvy director of corporate communications, is telling about both Schmidt's character and the fate of the phone project.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO because, among other reasons, he'd been to Burning Man, they must have known they were getting a boss with alternative values. But did they know that their newly hired grownup would prove to be Google's adulterer supervision? Schmidt is famous for having a series of girlfriends, despite being married, to whom he's reportedly promised marriage. Ones known to Valleywag include Rita Koselka and Marcy Simon. But it's Simon, his current fling, who might concern Page and Brin. Why? Because Simon has apparently wangled a desk and a phone line in Google's cramped New York offices.

BLACK ROCK CITY — The story so far: In between desert heat, bronchus-choking dust storms, too many Tecates, and a lingering desire to throw rebar tent stakes at the ravers across the street, we here have been continuing in our mission to spot Google bigwigs Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who are rumored to be raging around the playa in comfort as participants in this year's Burning Man festival.

Paul Addis, the man accused of setting torch to The Man, the wooden totem at the heart of the Burning Man festival, has drawn his share of fans and detractors. Chris Radcliffe, who's tangled with the organizers of Burning Man over various issues, even paid thousands of dollars in bail money to spring Addis from jail. But aside from a statement sent to blogger Scott Beale of Laughing Squid, he hasn't spoken to defend his actions. Until now. In an exclusive interview, Addis, who's been charged with the felony of arson, spoke to Valleywag as a friend drove him from Fernley, Nevada, back to his home in San Francisco. The full interview follows.

Philip Kaplan seems to have patched things up with AVN, the porn-industry trade publisher with which his company, AdBrite, runs an online ad network for adult websites. Earlier this month, AVN had abruptly yanked the AdBrite-run version of AVNAds.com offline and replaced it with its own hastily-built site for selling ads. In response, insiders said, Kaplan was readying to launch BlackLabelAds.com, AdBrite's own porn-ad network. Now, however, the AdBrite-run version of the network is back online. The spat however, came with a heavy financial price.

Get your resumes ready, Yahoos, if you haven't already. That rumored Yahoo reorg? Oh, it's on. We've heard that Yahoo has hired consultants Stone Yamashita Partners to help streamline the organization. And you know what consultants mean, right? As Mike Judge's cult classic Office Space reminds us:

Bad enough that Facebook has stolen Google's buzz, recruited away top engineers, and dashed its hopes of being a player in social networks. Now, Valleywag has learned, a team of scrappy Facebookers has dealt those smug, self-satisfied, arrogant, overfed Googlers a humiliation where it really matters — on the ultimate frisbee field, that is. Ultimate frisbee, a sport mixing soccer and frisbee-tossing, is popular on the college campuses where Facebook first grew popular. Google's team, unwisely, challenged their Facebook counterparts to a game on the Stanford campus. The result? A 15-11 win for Facebook. Carolyn Abram, Facebook's resident blogger and a team member, adds a first-hand report:

It's either News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's worst nightmare — or his wet dream. Two recent college graduates, Jess Martin and Drew Chen, have launched, as we predicted, SpaceLift, an application on Facebook that takes a chaotic, ugly MySpace profile page and displays it in Facebook's spare, blue-and-white layout. For Murdoch, who's voiced admiration for Facebook, even though News Corp. owns social-networking rival MySpace, this could be disastrous.

On AllThingsD, Kara Swisher has the scoop on some minor personnel moves at Yahoo. But surprisingly, the reporter who's normally so plugged into the mess at Yahoo may have missed the big news. One tipster claims that Gregory Coleman, the longtime head of sales, is on the way out, to be replaced by Hilary Schneider, who currently runs Yahoo's e-commerce businesses, such as they are. The ad salesforce is supposed to get the word today, with the official announcement coming tomorrow.

Those who can't do, teach. And those who teach, when it comes to Facebook, are charging handsomely for the privilege. RockYou, a maker of Web "widgets," those Web pages in miniature that clutter up blogs and MySpace pages, has not, apparently, figured out how to make money directly off of the Facebook apps they've created like Super Wall and Zombies. The Sequoia Capital-backed startup has, however, figured out how to make money from Facebook app developers. How? By charging them to sign up users by advertising their apps on RockYou's Facebook apps. The fee? Half a buck per user. It sounds like the perfect Ponzi scheme: As long as venture capitalists and clueless big companies are overpaying for startups based on the number of Facebook users they've signed up, it should work brilliantly. After the jump, slides from RockYou's pitch to fellow application creators.

Yahoo has decided to lump the hosers in with the Eurotrash, adding Canada to the Yahoo Europe team now headed by exec Toby Coppel. Why? Ostensibly because "Canada's multicultural diversity parallels Europe; and Canadian sites operate in English and French," Coppel claims in an inadvertently hilarious memo sent to all European and Canadian employees. The real reason, we suspect: Feeling his position threatened after career patron Terry Semel stepped down as Yahoo's CEO, and having been unceremoniously booted off Yahoo's "Management Team" page, Coppel is now begging for scraps of authority. Full memo after the jump.

A source close to the company tells Valleywag that Fotolog, the social network and photo-sharing site, has been sold to a large Latin American company for an amount over $100 million. Fotolog CEO John Borthwick, who's on his way to Italy for a family vacation, hasn't returned a request for comment. Update: "As if," emails Fotolog cofounder Scott Heiferman. Still, the rumored sale, if true, makes eminent sense for Fotolog — and for Borthwick. Fotolog, though based in New York City, never took off in its home market. But overseas, especially in Latin America, it's huge. The site, which asks users to post a single photo every day, now counts more than 10 million members. While clearly successful, Fotolog is just one of many ventures for Borthwick, a former executive at AOL and Time Warner — and a sale would free him up to pursue those.

Last week, Drew Curtis, left, the founder of Fark.com, the outrageous social-news website, accused Darrell Phillips, to his right, an employee at a News Corp.-owned Fox TV station in Memphis, Tenn., of attempting to hack into Fark.

AdBrite is rebounding fast from the loss of its porn-ads partnership with AVN, the prominent publisher of news and information about the adult-film industry. While AVN appears to have taken back control of AVNAds.com, a website previously operated by AdBrite to market a network of independent porn sites to advertisers and publishers, AdBrite is moving ahead with plans for its own network, BlackLabelAds.com. According to publishers briefed by AdBrite, the new network, although it currently points to AVNAds.com, is scheduled to launch on September 1.

When you talk about "the Valley" in tech, it's taken for granted that you mean Silicon Valley. But in the world of porn, "the Valley" is the San Fernando Valley, where the adult-film industry has established itself. Now, as porn goes online, there's a long, drawn-out war for dominance fought by the two valleys. And a tremendous battle has just been lost — by AdBrite, the online-advertising network based in San Francisco. AdBrite, Valleywag has learned, has lost the partner that gave it an entrée into the business of selling porn ads.

Local TV reporters are infamous for practicing "ambush" journalism — but as they try to take their gotcha practices to the Web, increasingly they're the ones ambushed. The first rule of hacking, after all, is "Don't get caught." And Fox newsman Darrell Phillips may have broken that rule, Drew Curtis has told Valleywag. Curtis, left, is the founder of Fark.com, a thoroughly juvenile, and entertaining, social news site where users pick the headlines. Phillips, to his right, is the new media manager at WHBQ Fox13, a News Corp.-owned TV station in Memphis, Tenn. And Curtis claims to have assembled all-but-conclusive electronic evidence that Phillips has tried to hack into Fark's servers, potentially breaking several laws.

The most fascinating bit in Brad Stone's exposé of Fake Steve Jobs? For commenter davidu, it was the revelation that real Apple CEO Steve Jobs was interviewed by instant messenger. Impressive: Someone at the Times — most likely John Markoff — has Jobs's iChat screenname. And editors at Gray Lady consented to the inclusion of notes from an IMterview. We sent our crack reporters on a digging mission and they discovered this exclusive transcript. Must credit Valleywag!

Sarah Meyers, Valleywag's new videographer, attended Facebook's Lunch 2.0 happy hour and asked Facebookers and other developers what the buzz was all about. She cut through the hype to get the real answer on why Facebook's so hot — the long-rumored IPO, of course.

Rip up your Facebook revenue estimates and start over, everyone. Since February, Facebook has doubled the rates it charged for sponsored groups from $150,000 to $300,000. Since exposing Facebook's supposedly nonexistent rate card, I've received a more recent version from June. Much of it's the same, but I'm posting the revised cards from Facebook's PowerPoint deck, with comments, below.