All Things Digital

I am at a new conference organized by August Capital’s David Hornik called The Lobby on the Big Island of Hawaii.

It is thick with Web 2.0 players, all here to interact and discuss issues, although without a formal program that is so typical of most Internet conferences.

In other words, the schmoozing in the halls is front and center, an interesting cut-to-the-chase twist from the gadfly VC Hornik.

So what was the talk last night at the opening cocktail party? The Facebook deal, of course, with most people being alternately incredulous, dubious and in awe of the $15 billion valuation that Mark Zuckerberg snagged from Microsoft.

In general, people were worried about the impact on their own companies, most agreeing that it would make the bubble even more bubblicious and that it marked the return of that frothy but queasy feeling of the first Internet bubble when AOL somehow managed to grab Time Warner in a deal that, as it turned out, will now live in infamy.

We’ll see about that, but now it is off to some mysterious group activity all day and, at some point, natch, a beach party.

Or as Elvis sang so movingly: Clambake! Geeks going to a Clambake!

Here’s some video, featuring folks like Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of Digg:

We have almost nothing to report today on Yahoo, except to point out that there are only three more days until the official end of CEO Jerry Yang’s 100-day No-Sacred-Cows Vision Quest.

While we expect the day to pass quietly at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale campus, BoomTown will mark the moment while on the Big Island of Hawaii, where August Capital VC David Hornik is holding his first gathering called The Lobby. He’s billing it as a “new media salon,” but all I know is that there are a lot of Silicon Valley types I can annoy in paradise!

Speaking of annoying, the departure of Yahoo’s marketing chief Cammie Dunaway was more than a little confusing in that it was clearly done quickly and without a lot of preparation. That leaves yet another empty slot at the top of the company going unfilled with more changes in the organizational structure of Yahoo.

Essentially, President Sue Decker said in a memo that she was splitting up the Network Marketing Division from the Customer Experience Division, which were both under Dunaway. While there are interim people in place, it is obvious the job Dunaway had will be cut back in power.

While that might be a good thing, and change is often for the best at Yahoo these days, getting major execs to sit still for a while is also advisable. Of course, Yahoo does not always have complete control of this situation.

Right now, for example, there is no CTO in place at Yahoo, following the departure in June of longtime tech head Farzad Nazem.

I have been talking a lot to Yahoo techies about that situation, which remains in flux. According to them, they don’t expect a hire at all (which Yahoo had said it would undertake when Nazem left).

Instead, it is being managed by a troika of execs in three areas–Executive Vice President, Platforms and Infrastructure Division Ash Patel; Executive Vice President of Engineering Search and Search Marketing Qi Lu; and Dr. Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President, Research and Strategic Data Solutions.

Of course, co-founder David Filo, who has remained at Yahoo all this time (even still tinkering with its servers) hovers quietly above it all as the iconic techie of Yahoo.

What is Om Malik going to announce at his party tomorrow night at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco?

Valleywag wanted to know what the well-known tech blogger was up to, so we will tell them: an online television interview and analysis show on Revision3 called “The GigaOm Show.”

Along with tech lawyer Joyce Kim (who is also sister-in-law to Jason Calacanis), the weekly show will be 10-minute talks with various tech CEOs and start-up entrepreneurs.

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