Everyone's piling on Jerry Yang, saying Yahoo's founder-CEO needs to go. Why? The weak stock that provoked Microsoft's unsolicited bid may have been the result of his absentee ownership over the years. But Yahoo's deeper problem is the rot in its technical prowess. And that has everything to do with the quieter cofounder, David Filo. Filo has stayed behind the scenes, but wields considerable power over Yahoo's infrastructure. Requests for more hardware go through him, for example. When Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner joked in an internal all-hands movie about not going through IT because it was "too much paperwork," the audience surely laughed because they knew exactly what he meant.

What makes for an appealing workspace? The envelopes they leave in your mailbox every two weeks. But after that, it comes down to design and amenities. Also, we like windows and brick. Lots and lots of brick. After spending some time on Office Snapshots, we present the ten best-looking offices in tech, below.

Jerry Yang's spin campaign about why the Microsoft bid fell through is transparent. He's not trying to cajole Steve Ballmer back to the negotiating table; he's trying to cover his rear and appease indignant shareholders. The only reason he's so open about accepting a new bid from Microsoft, I think, is that he's not expecting another one to come. Ballmer has more or less said he thinks that Yahoo is worth less and less every day; last Saturday, when Yang flew up with cofounder David Filo to meet with Ballmer one last time, was as close as the two will ever get to agreeing on Yahoo's worth. The thing is, unless Yang makes some dramatic shifts, Ballmer may well be right.

"Cathy Brooks is a typically unapologetic Silicon Valley Web addict," writes Brad Stone in the New York Times. "Last week alone, she produced more than 40 pithy updates on the text messaging service Twitter, uploaded two dozen videos to various video sharing sites, posted seven photographs on the Yahoo image service Flickr and one item to the online community calendar Upcoming." Usually, when one identifies a friend as an addict, an intervention is in order. But Stone, who seems to have spent so much time in San Francisco's tech circles that he's gone native, suggests more technology instead: Specifically, FriendFeed, which gathers all of this online activity in one place, making it marginally easier for Brooks's benighted friends to keep up with her online logorrhea.

As it stands, a producer can contract with a liquor distributor to produce a commercial at a profit, and then distribute the commercial on YouTube without paying a dime — even reaching underage audiences. Or he can get paid to place brands in the hands of sketch-comedy players. Again, he makes the money, not YouTube. I'm not sure that "innovation" is required so much as doing what television has been doing for generations, which is charging advertisers to distribute their commercial content.

Facebook's redesign — originally planned for early April, but delayed due to objections from widgetmakers like RockYou, Slide, and Zynga — is no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. Third-party developers have hijacked it. A source close to the redesign process tells us "Facebook has made some changes to the original design, reflecting developer concerns." Below, screenshots of Zuckerberg's original plans for the redesign, annotated with the objections Facebook-application startups raised.

Anyone telling you that Federated Media, the online ad network which reps Boing Boing, GigaOm, TechCrunch and other blogs, has raised $50 million from investors is dead wrong. It's true, Oak Investment Partners and others paid $50 million for shares of Federated. But only half of that went to the company, we're told; the rest went to founder John Battelle and other employees. According to our source, Battelle's take was roughly 90 percent of the insider shares sold, or about $22 million.

For a province of California, Silicon Valley can be strangely puritan at times. That made it an uncomfortable locale for libertine Libertarian Jimmy Wales, the less-than-saintly founder of Wikipedia. Wales told ex-lover Rachel Marsden, the Canadian controversialist, that he wanted to move to New York to be closer to her. Their affair is over — ended, fittingly, via a posting on Wikipedia — but Wales has relocated to New York all the same. The likely reason has to do with work, or the appearance of work. Although Wikipedia's nonprofit parent, the Wikimedia Foundation, is located in San Francisco, and his ostensible employer, for-profit wiki venture Wikia, has itsheadquarters in a suburb to the south of the city, Wales is charged with running a search-engine project for Wikia which is based in New York.

Are employees who even mention the word "union" on employer-organized internal message boards protected under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935? "This is kind of a new frontier, a gray area," Austin Garrido told me in a conference call with fellow former Uloop employee Sarah Doolittle last week. He and Doolittle claim they were fired after discussing unionization efforts at the college-focused social network. As their complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board continues to be investigated, one thing it could hinge on is if discussion about forming unions online is protected in the same way that posting a flyer in the company break room or chit-chat amongst coworkers on a shop floor. "It's something that really hasn't been considered in the past," Doolittle added. And what about third-party employee networks on sites like Facebook?

It wasn't the interview with now-former CIO Douglas Merrill, which served to convince me that the Canadian-nice Merrill will get eaten alive by the music industry. It wasn't the moment when Jim Killeen of Cobe, Ireland, a Catholic priest, argues the Pope's position on human sexuality with Jim Killeen of Denver, Colorado, the swinger and self-described "tranny chaser."

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, occasionally says something clever. Why doesn't his magazine cover politics? "We're not working on an election story," he told MarketWatch. "This comes from my own sense that politics today is being driven by the institutional structure of the past 20 years." Too bad Jimmy Wales hasn't figured this out. Proclaimed the founder of Wikipedia on July 4, 2006:

Every time Marc Andreessen steps away from his desk, disaster abounds. For the father of the Netscape browser, the creator of the Web as we know it, the legendary barefoot geek from the magazine covers, expectations are way too high. And so the disappointments pile up. The Andreessen of today is not the Marc we remember. His pate has gone from mophead to Klingon; his wardrobe, inevitably a tracksuit with leather shoes, is an utter disaster. And when he speaks, he says absolutely nothing. John Battelle, the slickster salesman-interviewer of bubbles past and present, tried to get some fighting words out of Andreessen on stage at Web 2.0 Expo. He failed, utterly, epicly. Andreessen praised Bill Gates, said competing with Microsoft was interesting, described Microsoft-Yahoo as "a good deal."

Myopic Wall Street often uses a microscope when it should use a telescope. The rot at Web publisher CNET goes far beyond the particulars of one quarter. Forget the question of by how many cents per share it missed earnings expectations, and ask yourself this: Why isn't CNET gushing cash? Its established brands in tech news and reviews should be printing money. No wonder hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to unseat its board. I'm not sure Jana has any plan, other than throwing the boardroom rascals out. So what's the problem, and what to do?

The longer Microsoft's bid for Yahoo drags on, the more annoying it gets. Jerry Yang was surely hoping that today's financials would settle the matter, as were many inside and outside his company. Wall Street hates uncertainty, and so does Silicon Valley's careerist corps of engineers. No such luck. Yahoo's earnings were good, but not good enough to be decisive and prompt Microsoft to bid more. But really, why would it? Microsoft's $31 a share offer wasn't predicated on Yahoo's current performance, but what Microsoft managers thought they could do with Yahoo if they got their hands on it. If Steve Ballmer wanted this to be over with quickly, he'd simply offer more than $31 a share; that he hasn't is the best indicator of his low opinion of Yang and his crew.

The Valley's secretive culture sprang up from its Pentagon contracts and the cult of intellectual property. Acolytes of Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand may remember his assertion that information wants to be free while dropping their annual 2CB on the playa — but it's far more rarely acknowledged that he prefaced that aphorism with the maxim that information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. And what's the most valuable information you can have? Information you can use against someone. While bosses are tasty game for a hungry underling, it's far easier for management to hunt their minions, since they have the keys to the Exchange server and outbound HTTP request logs. Having been logged, filtered and background-checked on Google at more than a few well-known local heavyweights myself, I present at least five ways you're being watched not by the NSA, but by the local, private sector — especially the paranoid executives at Apple.

Revision3 videoblogger Martin Sargent began the closing keynote at Ad:tech — also a live taping of his talk show Internet Superstar — with a video tour through the conference floor. The best part was when Sargent walked over to a booth. "So you're Smiley Media?" he asked. "That's us." Sargent: "What the fuckk are you so happy about?" The Daily Show's Rob Corddry couldn't have done it better. It was a good moment for Web TV, made especially sweet by the fact that hundreds of ad buyers — Revision3's prospective clients, many of them — were looking on from the audience. Too bad that was the keynote's last watchable moment.

Young San Jose resident Alex Polvi presented the least informed, but probably most typical argument for net neutrality in his public comment featured in this video clip from the rescheduled network neutrality hearings hosted by the FCC at Stanford today. But hey, even if he said "Internet" more than a dozen times, he didn't say "marketplace of ideas" or "fascism," like many of the other commenters. The people who should be most worried about the complex debate aren't free speech advocates or corporations, however, but big pharma. Listening to arguments for and against were a more powerful soporific than Ambien. Highlights from the seven hour session after the jump.

Cash money, not equity, is what powers the entertainment industry. Especially when it comes to talent. In a possibly apocryphal but illustrative anecdote, legendary bluesman Albert King reportedly refused to leave the stage until he had cash in hand from the concert promoter, presumably because he'd been cheated out of so many deals in the past. Studio accounting has an only slightly better reputation than that of the music industry when it comes to being, ahem, creative. Hence it's no surprise that when negotiating venture funding for Funny Or Die, Will Ferrell reportedly wanted to know what his upfront payout would be, according to Sequoia Capital's Mark Kvamme in comments to the New York Times. Which is one reason why private equity efforts to fund traditional film and television production have yet to pan out. Better to get your money upfront and walk away in case the project is a disaster. So how is Valley money changing Hollywood business models?

Mark Zuckerberg dodged a bullet. His mug got featured on TMZ next to a picture of his secret mistress, and luckily she happened to be his actual girlfriend. Michael Arrington kicks Valleywag out of a party, giving our party report far more attention than it probably deserved. And Robert Scoble strikes a Roman Polanski-esque pose with an underage tech-starlet in his lap. As a captain of online industry, a hack covering the beat and a publicity-hungry B-lister, all three share one thing in common — they want the good stuff that comes with being public figures (free publicity, adoring fans, access to wealth) without the bad (salacious press, limited privacy and expensive hangers-on). The world, of course, doesn't work that way. So here's eight tips from the entertainment industry that might help them navigate the nascent perils of Internet fame.

LOS ANGELES — I'm the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain't happening. It's finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it. The problem is you have to sell your own ads — but the studios and networks, unlike indie content creators and Valley startups, have armies of ad sales people still at their command. And it's still a hits-based business. So while it's great to have all the creative freedom in the world, you're still going to have to wait tables and get coffee for producers while working, unpaid, on your own projects and pray to the ghost of Mae West that something ends up with mass appeal. What does success look like in the wake of the online video revolution?