Can Google build up a hard-charging, Glengarry Glen Ross-style sales team? Somehow, I doubt it. The culture clash between Google's fact-driven, soft-spoken engineers and the raw-meat eaters it needs to get Madison Avenue's dollars seems insurmountable. But nonetheless, Google's HR department seeking an Alex Baldwin type to serve as a "mini-CEO," shaking cash out of Wall Street's big investment banks as a "business relationship manager." Funny, I thought Google already had a mini-CEO. Isn't his name Eric Schmidt?

Put down the Viking helmet and champagne, Facebook founders. There's actually a downside to that $15 billion valuation. Facebook plans to double its workforce from 350 to 700 in the next year, but that might be difficult, the Wall Street Journal argues. Why? Because the high valuation raises the value of stock options to the point where there's little potential upside for employees just signing on now. Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief revenue officer, admits, it's a "real issue." Nah. Hate to disagree with another Owen, but my namesake is wrong here.

Last week we speculated that ex-Yahoo chief marketer Cammie Dunaway was heading over to Nintendo to fill the gaping hole in its marketing department. Turns out we were right: She is the videogame-console maker's new VP of sales and marketing. Along with inheriting the title of "coolest mom in the universe," she's also snagged what has to be the easiest marketing job, ever. The Nintendo Wii is perhaps the most widely coveted electronic gizmo — still impossible to obtain and well on its way to driving its operating profit to $3.7 billion for the year. Honestly, the thing practically sells itself. No wonder she ditched Yahoo for this job.

Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina has signed on to be a Fox Business Network contributor. According to the press release, Fiorina achieved the highest rate of innovation in company history. How they measure that metric is a mystery to us; after all, shortly after Fiorina left, the company engaged in some highly innovative leak-detection practices, leading to the resignation of several board members. But never mind that. The only stat that will likely matter to Fox's Joe-Sixpack audience, sadly, is how short her skirt is.

How leaky is Facebook? So leaky that new hires sometimes out themselves right on the company's own website, as tech expert Jonathan Heiliger has done. Heiliger, you see, revealed his new employer by joining the company's private group for Facebook employees, a move that's visible on the site. Heiliger, who, back in the '90s, used to be a 20something rock-star Internet executive like new boss Mark Zuckerberg, will be the company's vice president of technical operations, charged with, oh, say, making sure the site doesn't crash, spew private data, or leak code. By my count, that makes Heiliger the fourth vice president with "operations" in his title. But I think Heiliger, a veteran of bubble-era companies like GlobalCenter and LoudCloud, will spend more time regaling Zuck with war stories about what it was like to run a ridiculously overvalued Internet company. And he'll thereby get to relive his fading youth. What a job!

The Huffington Post has named former CBSNews.com chief Betsy Morgan the political blog's new CEO, replacing cofounder Ken Lerer. One hopes that, unlike the site's columnists, she'll actually get paid. [Silicon Alley Insider]

The blogosphere was thrown into chaos when its search king, Technorati's David Sifry, abdicated his throne in August. The search for a new CEO went on for months. Who, after all, wanted to venture into a market increasingly dominated by Google, whose Blog Search was making Technorati increasingly irrelevant? But Technorati's board, at last, has found their patsy.Richard Jalichandra, a former business development guru at IGN Entertainment and Fox Interactive Media, whom insiders believe had a hand in the merger been game sites IGN and GameSpy, the acquisition of film site Rotten Tomatoes, and the company's acquisition by News Corp. for $650 million. Or not.

The innocent spin being put on top Apple lawyer Don Rosenberg's departure is that he got a better offer from Qualcomm. But Rosenberg, a decidedly gray figure who came to Apple from Big Blue, served as the company's general counsel for less than a year. He filled a post that had been empty for six months after Nancy Heinen left amid a stock-backdating scandal. And Rosenberg's replacement, Dan Cooperman, comes from Oracle, where he worked for Larry Ellison. Ellison, like Jobs, is a famously temperamental founder-CEO. He's also a close friend of Jobs, and used to serve on Apple's board of directors. This all seems quite cozy, and curiously timed. Anyone know the back story here — and why Apple keeps chewing through its top lawyers?

Google is hiring engineers in Europe, with the intent of one day having as many coders there as they do today in North America. But wait, doesn't this contradict Google CEO Eric Schmidt's promise to Wall Street to cut back on the pace of hiring? For our part, we're fine with the notion of Google adding more engineers, as long as they cut back on some of the bloat in headquarters. Fire away!

Congratulations to Scott Morrison, the former editor of Red Herring's website, on escaping the troubled publication and landing a new job in the San Francisco bureau of Dow Jones. No matter what they say, Rupert Murdoch has to be a better boss than Alex Vieux, whose mismanagement is driving the once-storied tech-magazine brand into the ground. We suspected he was on to greener pastures when coworkers told us he started missing work, but an announcement on the website of the The Society of American Business Editors and Writers confirms the new position for us. And for the rest of his colleagues, too. Note to Scott, next time you switch gigs, it might be more polite to send out an internal email before your underlings find out via an industry newsletter. Or some scurrilous gossip rag.

It's odd, sometimes, the contortions reporters will go through to make a story out of nothing — especially when they miss the real one. Take, for example, this report from IDG News about the planned departure of Intuit CEO Steve Bennett. The subhead of the article: "Intuit chief executive's resignation is not tied to April tax database snafu." The first sentence: "Four months after a database problem prevented thousands of U.S. users from paying their taxes on time, Intuit Inc.'s chief executive announced plans to step down." Obsessed with an embarrassing, expensive, but ultimately meaningless, glitch in Intuit's tax-prep software, IDG misses what's interesting about Bennett stepping down in December to make way for Intuit SVP Brad Smith.

Be careful what you ask for, especially when reporters are involved. PayScale, the go-to database for salary comparisons, syndicates articles alongside its compensation reports — the kind of filler that offers the gleam of respectability to run-of-the-mill career websites. To write those articles, PayScale is currently looking for a freelance writer "to alter 10-12 evergreen articles for syndication." Along with concocting a new introduction, conclusion and headline, writers are asked to "change stories as little as possible while making them exclusive to the syndication partner by providing just enough difference between the original and new versions." This will surely be welcome news to the "high-traffic websites" PayScale is charging a pretty penny for supposedly exclusive content.

VMware, that boring little virtualization-software company, has gotten a lot more interesting since its moonshot IPO. The partial spinoff from corporate parent EMC was the flashiest debut since Google, and the comparisons to the search behemoth keep coming. Bloomberg is reporting that VMware is now competing with Google for the very lifeblood of Silicon Valley — developers. And it's willing to use its newfound IPO wealth to steal programmers from the rest of the Valley. Of the 1,168 jobs — 1,168! — listed on VMware's career webpage, 596 are listed under IT or R&D. With a rumored starting salary of $130K-$160K, and stock options with a current strike price around $66, look for frustrated Googlers to start trickling towards Palo Alto.

Salesforce.com poached Advent Software CFO Graham Smith to replace current CFO Steve Cakebread, who has been promoted to president and chief strategy officer. [News.com]

The chaos at Technorati and PodTech, two startups which saw outside CEO searches end in failure last week, should be instructive to company founders everywhere. If you're asking yourself if it's time to step aside, it's too late. Entrepreneurs are often excellent evangelists — the peculiar Silicon Valley breed of marketer who seeks to create fervor for a product few even understand, let alone think they need. Sifry and Furrier are both typical of this kind. But the career of evangelist bears a particular occupational hazard: The risk of starting to believe your own preachings, and of thinking that no one else is fit to deliver them.

In a podcast with Leo LaPorte, Patrick Norton admits that he's joining Revision3, the online-video startup staffed by many of his former coworkers at TechTV, the late, lamented nerd-news cable channel. [The Week In Tech]

Patrick McVeigh, veteran of Apple and Palm, named CEO of startup SoonR. [San Jose Mercury News]

John Furrier, CEO of troubled videoblogging startup PodTech, has finally replaced himself, as promised. But the long search for a CEO to lead the faltering video network can only be judged a failure. James McCormick may have "23 years of operational, finance, and senior management experience," but he has never served as the public face of a company. His appointment, too, can hardly be said to be the result of a "search": He's been working behind the scenes as PodTech's COO for the last nine months under Furrier. Had he really filled the company's needs, and more importantly, the demands of PodTech's restless investors, he would have been promoted without interviewing outsiders. Furrier's skills of persuasion — which seem to be the main thing holding the company together — apparently didn't sway any candidates. (Photo by Robert Scoble)

Apple is staffing up for its first Australian store, a location in central Sydney. [Reg Hardware]

IAC CEO Barry Diller tightens his grip on Connected Ventures, the IAC-controlled parent of CollegeHumor.com, by installing minion Moshe Koyfman as its COO. [CNNMoney]