Why is Marissa Mayer, Google's athletically inept cupcake princess, going on such a publicity tour of late? She was in the Times Sunday. Last night, she hit Charlie Rose to make excuses for not innovating.

The Valley's biggest players are all racing to be the center of your online life, collecting your photos, blog posts, Twitter messages, and comments into one stream — and then dosing it with real-time ads.

Google executive Marissa Mayer, best known for her ballgowns, cupcakes, and whimsical designs, feels that the media has ignored her athletic achievements. But how does she compare to rivals like Mrs. Bill Gates?

Pamela Passman, a lawyer who's been with Microsoft for 13 years and oversees the company's feel-good efforts, is launching a new program to educate technologically illiterate Americans. She could start with herself!

"My Phone" rhymes with "iPhone"? Microsoft executive claims cluelessness.

What's Facebook really worth? The fast-growing social network is adding to its 150 million users effortlessly. But revenues aren't growing as easily. And that has Mark Zuckerberg's company tied up in legal and financial knots.

TED, the annual gathering of the most pretentious people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design, just got punk'd. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitos into the crowd.

Microsoft's first-ever mass layoffs bore unusual fruit for Microsoft obsessive Todd Bishop, who spent the weekend in Seattle-area thrift shops. He discovered more discarded Microsoft logowear than ever. Some of his finds:

Fired employees often say impolite things. But only at Microsoft are their pink slips unprintable. The software giant fired 1,400 people this week — some with specially encoded, read-only email.

Microsoft is shedding 5,000 jobs from its 95,000-person workforce, the company's first-ever mass layoff. It's about time. And let's put the blame where it belongs: Bill Gates.

• UBS will make a fourth round of job cuts and is closing several divisions. [BN]
• A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Bank of America for failing to disclose the risks associated with the acquisition of Merrill Lynch. [Reuters]
• More BoA-Merrill trouble: It seems the bank accelerated bonus payments last month so it could hand out the cash before the bank changed hands. [FT]
• The SEC has filed charges against missing hedge funder Arthur Nadal. [NYP]
• Win Bischoff's goodbye email to Citigroup employees. [Deal Journal]
• A record $152 billion was pulled from hedge funds in the fourth quarter. [DB]
• In other bad news, Microsoft is cutting 5,000, Intel is laying off 6,000, and Sony says it lost $2 billion more than expected last year. [WSJ, CNN, BN]

If you thought Microsoft's Seinfeld ads were bad, then you really don't want to see this new four-minute Microsoft "Songsmith" pseudoinfomercial. Because it is a descent into child karaoke hell, is why. Very bad.

When political candidates concede a campaign, they praise the "long journey" and talk about how much they've "learned." In the same mode, Microsoft's CEO has all but said he's given up on the Zune.

No one wants to buy Yahoo. And the only person who wants to run Yahoo is an insider who helped sink it. Is there any hope left for the beleaguered Web giant?

Voice your choice! Earlier we showed you three of the year's most annoying TV ads; now we've added two more, and made a poll—of infamy. Vote below for the year's worst ad:

Bill Gates has been trying to own the Internet for 13 years. He couldn't beat Google. He couldn't buy Yahoo. So now he wants to start with a clean slate. Enter "Kumo"!

It's become an integral part of modern life: You experience a random physical symptom—a headache, say, or a muscle twitch, or a rash—and whereas in those prelapsarian days before the internet, it might have preoccupied you briefly then disappeared before you'd even gotten around to calling a doctor, now a quick Google search will diagnose it as the first sign of a devastating, and terminal, disease. Cyberchondria is epidemical, a new study reveals, which is not surprising given that web searches tend to offer the impression that rare, fatal illnesses are afflicting people like colds and flus.

Need more examples? Here are commercials from MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.com. (I found them using Google and YouTube, a Google-owned video-hosting site.) Do any of them articulate a reason to switch search engines?

The Inquirer is convinced that Microsoft will launch a Microsoft-branded Zune phone in February. Not some other brand's phone running Windows, but an actually iPhone-wannabe Microsoft Zune phone. The Inq cites a geek detail to make it real: The phone will use Nvidia's Tegra mobile CPU chip, not unlike this Nvidia prototype CNET handled. In theory, that means it can do most of what a desktop PC can do. In practice, that means it'll probably be hated on as just much as Vista.

"Spammers and scam artists are abusing Microsoft's live.com and livefilestore.com properties to redirect visitors to sites that peddle fake pharmacy products, porn and Nigerian 419 scams." That's how WaPo security blogger Brian Krebs explains Microsoft's appearance on the list of Top 10 Worst Spam Service ISPs maintained by the non-profit Spamhaus Project. Krebs got a non-denial denial from Microsoft that overlooks the fact that many of the scams have been high-profile examples for months. As Krebs points out, even the directionless dweebs at Yahoo (I'm paraphrasing) fixed this problem on their own sites.