The latest Valley guessing game: Who will be Yahoo's next CEO? Jerry Yang's days seem numbered; if he does not win reelection to the board at Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting, now pushed back to August, he will almost certainly have to step down as boss, too. Overeager to throw a name out — likely in the hopes of currying favor if one of their guesses turns out to be right — the likes of Kara Swisher and Michael Arrington are suggesting a series of candidates. Dan Lyons gets it right in a blog post, writing as Fake Jerry Yang: None of them are likely to fly. None are likely even to be interested in the job.

Life inside the Googleplex already resembles a daycare center, with its primary colors, bouncy exercise balls, and free food. But if you're a parent working at Google, daycare has become a nightmare. As recently as last July, Google advertised its Kinderplex child-care center as a perk, though the rates it charged weren't much below the market price. The reality: Googlers haven't been able to get their kids into the Kinderplex, thanks to a long waiting list, and the facility is now closing, being replaced by overpriced facilities designed at the behest of Susan Wojcicki, the multimillionaire sister-in-law of Google cofounder Sergey Brin and mother of four. Google employee-parents are up in arms — not over the price hike itself, but over the way the decision came down from on high.

This is the week to leave Yahoo, it seems — not because something's happening. But because nothing is. Jeremy Zawodny (badge pictured here) and JR Conlin, two Yahoo veterans with 18 years of tenure between them, both took pains to say that their departures had nothing to do with Microsoft or Carl Icahn's bids for the company — believable, since an expected Yahoo-Google search partnership seems to have put both of those overtures into a deep freeze. Higher up the chain, reports confirm the departure of Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's chief data officer, and Jeff Weiner, head of Yahoo's Web-content properties.

Apple PR has finally come up with an unconvincing explanation for Apple CEO Steve Jobs's all-too-evident skinniness: Jobs was suffering from a "common bug" when he spoke at Apple's WWDC event, a spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. Spin aside, there's no hiding the fact that Apple CEO Steve Jobs used to have more heft a decade ago. Some continue to worry about his brush with cancer, or an overly strict diet imposed by wife Laurene Powell-Jobs, or a case of manorexia. But it's not like Jobs slimmed down overnight. The ever-shrinking Jobs in pictures, from 1998 to 2008, below.

Thanks to Google search and Gmail's ever-expanding capacity, I don't have to remember much of anything anymore beyond a unique string or group of words to call up facts, dates and important documents. Convenient? Yes, as long as my laptop is nearby. But is my brain rewiring itself to rely on Web-based memory? That's what Matt Asay is arguing on News.com. Asay highlights quotes from Nick Carr's article in The Atlantic which suggest our malleable mind is increasingly dependent on the Internet for cognition. Does that make Google the sizzling pan, and our brains fresh eggs ready for a fryup? I'm not so sure.

How can everyone have missed the most lurid aspect of the fall of former Broadcom CEO Henry Nicholas? Amidst all the sex and drug charges, we've missed the one subject that really gets people's tongues wagging: real estate. Thanks to laws passed in America's "war on drugs," any property involved in the transportation, storage and sale of illegal narcotics is subject to seizure. Thanks to the magic of Google Maps and Street View, we can also get a glimpse into the somewhat banal landscape of Nicholas's party circuit under the oppressively constant sunshine of Southern California's Orange County and Nevada. Let's start at Broadcom headquarters.

Google has introduced Gmail Labs, a digital playground for Googlers to develop new features for Gmail in their spare time. It's a well-staged PR event, a timely effort to remind the press — and through them, potential hires — that Google lets engineers spend 20 percent of their time on side projects. Gmail Labs, though, is a sign of how 20 percent time as early Googlers knew it is vanishing from the Googleplex.

The best thing with which to mock a company that shouldn't exist is a company that doesn't actually exist. And San Francisco's Internet hipsters won't just snicker about your startup behind your back; they'll do it where your vanity Google Blog Alerts will find it. Plurk is only the latest target — a startup that lets users post short updates to the Web, as Twitter does, but adds a timeline. Plurk's faux nemesis: Pheltup, "the first social network that not only tells you WHO is doing WHAT; but also WHY." When some Twitter "thought leaders" — Pheltup's target market — fell for the rumor that it had acquired the freshly hatched Plurk, it just showed how easily pranked the neophile cool kids of the Web are. What upped the ante is that Plurk's real executives are now actually responding to the (fake) buzz about their "crude and unwholesome" would-be owners.

Google's announcement today of a massive campus expansion was inevitable. Having taken over every last scrap of office park around it not occupied by neighbor Intuit, Google is expanding the Mountain View Googleplex to the west — and, more controversially, to the east, on land owned but poorly used by Nasa. Ignore the happy talk about Google and Nasa's scientific partnerships; those are an obvious fig leaf to cover the use of public land by a private entity. (Let's not even get started on Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt's sweetheart deal to park their party plane on Nasa grounds.) Google has grown to be a powerful employer in the Bay Area, and its wealthy executives donate freely to local politicians, so we should hardly expect the powers that be to stop it. What's good for Google is good for America, or so we'll be told.

Welcome to the Silicon Valley hype cycle: One year, and you're over. That seems to be the consensus on Facebook's vaunted platform, whose one-year anniversary went largely unremarked. The company itself didn't blog about it until today, and sources tell us an open-bar party Facebook held in Palo Alto was low-key to the point of despair. It can't have helped that Google was throwing a massive party in San Francisco the same day to close out its conference for developers. How different a scene from a year ago, when the F8 launch event of Facebook Platform won comparisons of the company to Microsoft and of founder Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates.

Did anyone actually offer to buy Glam Media for $1.3 billion? We asked sources familiar with the company and its publishing partners. The one-word answer: No. The two-word answer: No way. The non-verbal answer: giggles. So who's the source of the rumor? Probably Glam CEO Samir Arora himself.

CARLSBAD, CA — The other night, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam and I were talking about what he'd learned about Bill Gates's brain. Our conclusion: Like an overstuffed hard drive, he needs defragging — the utility that rebuilds a drive bit by bit to put it in proper working order. Buried in software wizardry, Gates has lost touch with what people want to do with technology. But why pick on Gates? None of the speakers at the D6 conference, held in this Southern California seaside town, have shown they have much in the way of ideas.

How to make your cleantech capitalist dreams resonate with the hicks and hawks of Washington, D.C.? In a perfect storm of liberal guilt and heartland pandering, former Secretary of the Navy and CIA director R. James Woolsey has become a domestic-energy sustainability convert. And he's just one of a number of red-blooded Americans who support the war in Iraq and investment in renewable energy, according to Mother Jones. Woolsey joined Henry Kissinger, who hasn't met a long-range bombing platform he didn't like, in endorsing John McCain, whom Woolsey compared to environmental steward Teddy Roosevelt. If cleantech startups want to drink from the fountain of defense spending that has traditionally irrigated the Valley, they need to pay attention.

In the age of desktop software, Microsoft had the luxury of taking years to copy competitors. In the age of Web software, it's next to impossible to catch up. As customers use websites, they generate data which helps the site's creator improve it continuously. It's a topsy-turvy world reminiscent of David Brin's The Practice Effect, which Microsofties would do well to read. Spending nearly three years to implement even a bad idea like bribing users to use its search engine shows how badly ossified Redmond's software-development culture has become.

Soon America's most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and make their workaday homes in cubes at Google, MySpace, or Amazon.com. And they will suffer not just the indignity of having to work for a living, but also the dispiriting realization that a job at a cool company isn't always that hot. These employers, and the others hiring for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs, listed below, will look spiffy on a resume someday, but for now the only good these jobs promise the world is the pleasant feeling you and I can share knowing we're not the ones stuck in them.

CNET has been eyed by Quincy Smith, CBS's hyperacquisitive online chief, long before he sealed a $1.8 billion deal to buy the company. As a banker at Allen & Co., CNET was his client. "At one point, he wrote this major presentation about how valuable content was," a tipster tells us. "The single example in it was CNET. It was basically his only idea." An unfair dig? Perhaps. There is little like CNET on the market — a pure play on professional online content worth $1.8 billion? It can't be found. But the lack of a direct competitor may have also been CNET's undoing — the mixed blessing that brought it under attack by activist investors and led it to CBS's waiting arms.

In explaining Carl Icahn's raid on Yahoo, pundits bring up his efforts to shake up tech and media giants like Motorola and Time Warner. But I think there's a better analogy in Icahn's past: TWA. Icahn's attempt to gain a board seat or broker a new deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft will not send Yahoo soaring; if left unchecked, he will run Yahoo into the ground as surely as he did that troubled airline. Icahn's bid, and the support it is drawing from large Yahoo investors, seems premised on the notion that he can bring Microsoft and Yahoo back to the bargaining table. That seems unlikely.

Everyone wants to sell ads like Amazon.com sells books — one click and it's done. Social networks Facebook and MySpace as well as ad networks AdBrite, AdReady and AdItAll have all followed Google to offer advertisers do-it-yourself buying options. The trend has led both the Wall Street Journal and PaidContent to wonder if online ad sales teams will go the way of the dodo, or at least the travel agent. The answer — especially for social networks MySpace and Facebook — is no.

Looking at the departure of top Google flack Elliot Schrage for Facebook and concluding that the search engine is suffering a "brain drain" is the laziest journalism on the subject I could imagine. The BBC's take on the subject is predictable, citing the same names — Ben Ling, Ethan Beard, even chef Josef Desimone — everyone else does. The most telling thing is actually a Google spokesbot's programmed response: "We have a deep management pool at Google." The problem at Google is not that its brains are going out the drain. It's that the drain is plugged up, and not nearly enough are leaving.

A firestorm is now brewing over pornography on Wikipedia and its accessibility to children. The FBI is investigating the matter, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily reports. Jay Walsh, the spokesman for Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, has disclaimed all official responsibility for the contents of the world's greatest compendium of fictional balls. But who oversees the contents of Wikipedia for the foundation? Why, Erik Möller, its deputy director. And Möller is deeply, deeply concerned about the children.