Of all the people corporate raider Carl Icahn nominated for Yahoo's board, Mark Cuban, the loudmouthed Internet entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner is the guy we wished had made it. If only for the boardroom theatrics with milquetoast Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. Take Cuban's latest comments to Bloomberg: "Jerry's too nice a guy. He cares too much. They've got a lot of avenues they could take but all of them depend on being a lot meaner and a lot more aggressive and that's just not their style." Cuban should know: He took Yang for $6 billion during the dotcom bubble by selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, then made sure to collar his shares so they kept their value while Yang's fortune plunged. Never heard of Broadcast.com? Exactly Cuban's point.

A Valleywag spy attended the second day of TechCrunch50 and then followed the crowd to a dinner, a party and an after party. He learned that blondes love Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis likes to drink, and flack turned TechCrunch blogger Calley Nye knows how to leave with a billionaire. Also, our spy reports that the startup that's getting everyone's attention at the show itself is doing it "through the use of hot and semi naked booth girls." All that and more in his bullet-point recap, below.Conference

Dan Rather's contract with Mark Cuban's TV network HDNet should not be up until nearly a year from now, assuming the terms Rather disclosed just before he inked the deal still hold. But would the contract prevent the former CBS Evening News anchor from contributing in some way to Tina Brown's forthcoming news website The Beast? Perhaps that's what Brown and Rather were discussing during a "very long lunch" at The Park on Tenth Avenue, as reported by a Post spy. Though Rather's work at HDNet has garnered some positive recognition, it's not nearly as visible as his work for CBS was. A Web gig or partnership would give Rather a shot at regaining more of the attention he once had — and that any veteran TV newsman would crave. Perhaps the skilled lawyers working for Brown's business partner Barry Diller can work something out on the proud old newshound's behalf. [Post]

Mark Cuban, the boisterous fellow who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1998 and later bought the NBA's Dallas Mavericks, now wants to own the Chicago Cubs. He's submitted a bid which the the Chicago Tribune reports has made it through a first round of eliminations. Don't get your hopes up, Mark: Former Deadspin editor Will Leitch wrote here in January that he'll never get the Cubs, or any other baseball team, because he's far too nuevo rico for the stuffy Major League Baseball owners' club.

Corporate raider Carl Icahn made his proxy fight for control of the Yahoo board official today, filing an alternative slate with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The slate includes nine of the ten names Icahn already put forward in a letter to Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock. Bob Shaye, former cochairman and co-CEO of the recently defunct New Line Cinema, is no longer on the list. The filing includes a letter from Icahn to Yahoo shareholders in which Icahn urges them to vote for his slate because "Steve" — as in Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — told him it would grease the wheels for a deal: "If a new board consisting of my nominees were to be elected,Microsoft would be willing to enter into discussions regarding a transaction immediately." Icahn's proposed slate and its members brief bios, below.

As far as circles of hell go, we've already established you can't really do much worse than the Television Critics Association semi-annual press tours — the gaseous summer version of which is feeding the palms in Beverly Hills as we speak. But it's not just the bloggers and bitter ideologues who have ruined the bed-in between networks, stars and the writers who love them (until the expense account runs out, anyway); we're learning more today about why the TCA tour may have bottomed out earlier than predicted, featuring an opening cavalcade of virtually uncoverable has-beens and hypocrites who don't bode well for the future of, well, anything. From the WaPo:

Two years ago, Mark Cuban wrote: "Would Google be crazy to buy YouTube? No doubt about it. Moronic would be an understatement of a lifetime." Since then, Google did buy it — for $1.65 billion — and the site's become so popular its actually the Web's third most popular search engine all on its own. Does that mean Cuban has changed his mind? No, no, it does not. The reason is Hulu, Cuban explains in 802 words, which we've edited down to 100, below.

Carl Icahn's slate of replacement directors for Yahoo's board is a list of head-scratchers, except for one name. That's Mark Cuban, the guy who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1998 and used the money to buy the Dallas Mavericks. "Talk about biting the hand that feeds," writes VC blogger Fred Wilson. "It's a downright hostile move for Cuban." Actually, hedging his Yahoo shares so he kept his fortune while founder Jerry Yang's cratered in the dotcom bust — that was hostile. Think Yang doesn't remember that? (Photo by eschipul)

Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock has a letter from corporate raider Carl Icahn in his inbox. It's more than 3,000 words long. For a version that Bostock and you can read before Icahn completes his raid, see below.

Blogging billionaire Mark Cuban dropped by a meeting of Texas's Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing members in San Antonio yesterday. His message: "The Internet is dead. It's had its time; say goodbye." Cuban went on to explain that high-definition entertainment (like that offered on his HDNet channels) is the present and the future, promising that cable companies can leverage those big, pretty screens for computer-like features.

So the blog by Spitzer's call girl is obvs fake, because all she writes about is blogs. I wish it were harder to tell, or at least had clever jokes, because then she could join this list of the ten best ever parody blogs.

I've always loved to watch Mark Cuban dance — but Tuesday night I got to see the billionaire booty-shaker up close. The venue: PureVolume Ranch in Austin, Texas. The occasion: The Bigg Digg Shindigg, South by Southwest Interactive's closing party. "You guys always picked the worst photos of me," Cuban said. Mark, as I said at Sunday's panel on gossip, I live to serve. Digg packed PureVolume's dance floor and backyard tents with hundreds of partygoers. Besides Cuban, Moby was there, as were Digg CEO Jay Adelson and cofounder Kevin Rose, iLike CEO Ali Partovi, StumbleUpon's Garrett Camp, and Automattic's Matt Mullenweg. RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser had just flown in from Florida on a private jet. But for me the most interesting person was newly hired Digger Aubrey Sabala, who put the party together in three days — after Digg had given up on the idea.

"What makes this country great is patents and copyrights." Amen, Mikey. God bless America. [Rex Sorgatz]

Former Disney chief Michael Eisner, right, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban participate in a question and answer panel at the SXSW Film and Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, March 11, 2008. (Photo by AP/Jack Plunkett)

Dallas Mavericks owner and well-known billionaire blogger Mark Cuban has banned bloggers from the team's locker room. Hypocritical? Cuban says there is simply not enough room, explaining "I am of the opinion that a blogger for one of the local newspapers is no better or worse than the blogger from the local high school, from the local huge Mavs fan, from an out of town blogger." Right-o! For a rich, supposedly savvy blogger guy, Cuban obviously doesn't know what the fuck is going on in the media these days. One newspaper editor challenged him by saying that blogging is part of newspaper beat reporter's job now, and Cuban responded like so:

Jason Calacanis started a company, Weblogs Inc., and sold it to AOL for $25 million. And he has some ideas on how to build a successful startup. But Mark Cuban started a company, Broadcast.com, and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion. So you'd probably rather read Cuban's "Rules for Startups" post — though not all 707 words of it. Here's a version you have time for:

Mark Cuban was happy to sit with Deadspin blogger Will Leitch for an interview to go into GQ. (Deadspin, a sports blog, is owned by Gawker Media, Valleywag's publisher.) But then Cuban saw Leitch's subsequent post on Valleywag. "While I respect the magazine," Cuban writes on his blog, "I am not a fan of the site [Leitch] works for, or of its affiliated site that the blog ran on. I would not have done the interview had I known he would blog about it for this site." Which is too bad, really. We're normally fans of the outspoken, outrageous entrepreneur-blogger. Except when he engages in phony self-righteousness. "Is this ethical?" he asks.

Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin, our sister sports site, and his book God Save The Fan is now available at bookstores everywhere. He makes a cameo appearance here discussing why rich techies should avoid the world of team ownership.

Recently, I traveled to Dallas to interview Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban for GQ magazine. (Stupidly, I mentioned my day job, as editor of Valleywag sister site Deadspin, at the beginning of the interview. I once posted about Cuban getting a lap dance from a friend, in what I thought was a clearly joking manner. Cuban was not amused and spent most of the interview accusing Deadspin of being the Inside Edition of sports. So that was fun.)

Oh no! Mark Cuban has too many friends on Facebook. The graceful Web tycoon just bumped his head against Facebook's 5,000-friend limit. Now Cuban faces the daunting challenge of deciding who among the 100 friend requests a day he should honor. Of course he blogged about it.

Valleywag's favorite dancer, Mark Cuban, is sashaying to enter the crowded market of Facebook applications with Radical Buy. Radical Buy is not radically different from other venues for selling goods, like eBay or Facebook's own Marketplace. Cuban's approach is distinguished in one significant way: The application introduces commissions to those who display other people's listings and help close sales. By providing even nonsellers with a chance to make money, Radical Buy hopes to get uptake beyond a small audience of Cuban followers.

With all this talk of Comcast and Canadian Internet service providers throttling file-sharing connections, serial entrepreneur and twinkle-toes Mark Cuban has decided, in big, bold letters, that ISPs should "BLOCK P2P NOW." Although he's not a Comcast subscriber, he supports its crusade to rid the Internet of "P2P freeloaders" because he doesn't want them eating up all his bandwidth. (As does Valleywag. Don't like it? Lay your own cable, pikers. Cuban is a billionaire from selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo, and could actually afford to take our advice.) But we're curious why he's suddenly decided he has a problem with peer-to-peer software.