Is 23-year-old Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg worth $3 billion, as ignorant slut Kara Swisher of AllThingsD believes? Or nearly $5 billion, as Valleywag has reported? Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka has absolutely zero fresh reporting to add on this matter, but he says he wants a cage match between us to settle the matter. No way! That mean lesbian would claw my eyes out in three seconds flat. I'm glad she's wasting time in Hawaii right now instead of doing some real work. [Silicon Alley Insider]

Jerry Yang, the founder and current CEO of Yahoo, spoke about the obstacles facing his company during a "fireside chat" at a conference held by Right Media Exchange, an online-ad startup Yahoo recently acquired. Yang concedes the many difficulties facing the Internet company, but with antiseptic corporatespeak that puts a chill on what should have been an intimate and revealing "chat." Fortunately, his comments are so transparent, it's easy to see their true meaning. Choice quotes with honest translations after the jump.

At last, I understand the vision of synergy between News Corp. and Dow Jones. It's all about Kara Swisher, basically. The abrasive, pint-sized reporter-turned blogger spent dinner at Web 2.0 Summit locked in conversation with gregarious, pint-sized megamogul Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.'s CEO, and, come December, Swisher's boss. Swisher, of course, has been blogging hot and heavy on AllThingsD about Facebook, MySpace's chief rival. She's just the starting point. News Corp. is so vast that next year, it could easily assign an army of Wall Street Journal reporters just to cover itself. Check out the photos for Swisher's encounter with Murdoch, and more.

OutCast PR held an AfterHours party at Frisson, the restaurant co-owned by Facebook board member Peter Thiel. So cozy, since Facebook is OutCast's biggest new client! The place was overrun with hacks and flacks. No surprise, since OutCast wants to show off its chummy press relationships, and other flacks are drawn to journalists like moths to flames. And, of course, OutCast wanted to keep things well-staffed to watch over reporters chatting up executives from Facebook and Yahoo, another big OutCast client. No need, it turned out.

Google is racing with Yahoo and Microsoft to take a stake in Facebook, and win some of its advertising business. As with YouTube, Google was late to get in on the Facebook deal — but again, it's making a full-court press, with some of its top people. Negotiating the deal: Tim Armstrong, Google's chief of ad sales; Susan Wojcicki, Google's VP in charge of product management for advertising; Joan Braddi, a Google VP involved with search; and Megan Smith, a veteran Google dealmaker. Armstong is leading Google's approach, but we hear Smith is playing a crucial behind-the-scenes role. She was also, coincidentally, spotted by many chatting up Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a recent party thrown by Facebook app-developer iLike.

So unfair: Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson is handily winning a charity contest whose prize is a lunch with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. We'd think Wilson, who sold Del.icio.us to Yahoo, could ring up Yang and have lunch anytime he likes. More deserving: The brash, grating Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, who would likely make Yang suffer by filming the entire meal. [AllThingsD]

"I'm going to use my $100 rebate I get from the I-had-to-have-it-before-my-brother iPhone to get one! And I'll even have a dollar left over for a refreshing can of soda." — AllThingsD's Kara Swisher on the new, low-priced Palm Centro. Kara, you ignorant slut. Don't you know that you can only use your iPhone credit on Apple products? [AllThingsD]

Buried in this TechCrunch40 wrap-up post is a frightening promise from AllThingsD's Kara Swisher:

AllThingsD's Kara Swisher, tired of playing ambush journalist with her handheld videocamera, tries her hand at pretending to be Dan Lyons, the fabulous Forbes fabulist behind "The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs." Sort of. Except here, she's Fake Jerry Yang, a faux version of Yahoo's CEO, not Fake Steve Jobs The best bit comes when Swisher imagines Yang's reaction to Brad Garlinghouse, the controversial Yahoo executive who called for major changes in what's now called "The Peanut Butter Memo."

Kara Swisher's interview with new Yahoo sales executive Dave Karnstedt makes more sense if you search and replace "nice" with "ragingly ineffective," which is what we suspect she's too nice to say. [AllThingsD.com]

Now that News Corp. appears to have locked up Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, every journalist on the planet is volunteering to be an unpaid consultant to Rupert Murdoch. I'm sure he appreciates the free advice. The News Corp. CEO is so known for taking it, after all. First up, there's Kara Swisher's tabloid-headlined call for more "promiscuity," which I was about to get behind. Talk about a paper that needs sexing up! But then I discovered that the word, in Swisher's hands, has gone entirely limp. Her deflated meaning?

We asked, and Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com helpfully answered: Om Malik is launching a television show with Revision3, the online-video site cofounded by Digg's Kevin Rose and now run by Jim Louderback, theman who made a well-timed exit from PC magazine. The deal was thinly disguised, since Revision3's PR firm was the one to send out invites for a party Malik's holding tonight to celebrate the deal. The result of the partnership is called "The GigaOm Show," and will cover many of the same personalities who pop up in Malik's GigaOm blog. But now, here's the question that Swisher didn't ask — and should have.

On her blog, Kara Swisher is running a cartoon comparing Walt Mossberg to Anton Ego, the "dour, humorless" food critic from the Disney/Pixar movie Ratatouille. Mossberg, of course, is the gadget reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, and Swisher is a hyperconnected Valley reporter extraordinaire, and the two have a long-lasting friendship, as well as a partnership running AllThingsD.com. But can it possibly endure this jab from the acid-tongued Swisher? (Illustration by Adam Tow for AllThingsD.com)

Kara Swisher doubts Accel Partners' Jim Breyer has the guts to put the squeeze on Facebook app developers: "My 5-year-old son could handily best the doe-eyed VC in a fair fight." [AllThingsD.com]

Say what you like about Jason Calacanis: At least the bulldog-like entrepreneur isn't afraid to bite the hand that feeds him. Lightly. Without teeth. Calacanis accuses venture capitalist Roelof Botha and his colleagues of not being telegenic, a fact captured by AllThingsD.com's Kara Swisher in her video we linked to yesterday. But telegenic or not, Sequoia is the hot venture capital firm of the moment, which is why entrepreneurs should study, intently, the brief glimpse of Sequoia's inner sanctum Swisher filmed. Why? So that when you go to pitch your startup, you can walk in acting like you've seen it all before. Because you have. Required viewing, after the jump.

Kara Swisher talks to VC Roelof "Rudy" Botha, sneaks in her camera for a quick tour of the Sequoia Capital lobby. [All Things D]

Last night, I cheated my way into a book party for California-based writer and web publisher Arianna Huffington at the San Francisco guest house of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and romance novelist Melanie Craft Ellison. First lesson: Don't go to a society event dressed for a Silicon Valley geek party. Second lesson: F. Scott Fitzgerald was right, the rich are not like you and me.

Wrap up the Powerbook cord and follow Esther Dyson to the next con — the D Conference winds down today. For actual news from people who are there, check out the Wall Street Journal's blog. (Favorite post: Turning the schmaltz up to 11.) For trumped-up news filtered through the snark machine, look no further. Photos by ZDNet reporter Dan Farber.