Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell Valleywag’s always controversial gossip blogger, Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.” Deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate is his replacement.

Here are Thomas’s last words on the controversial gossip site.

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Whatever her personal turmoil, troubled actress Lindsay Lohan–aka Lindsanity–has been the patron saint of the Web’s gossip sites, as well as magazines and more, most recently for the spectacular and restraining-orders-all-around breakup she has had with DJ Samantha Ronson.

So where did Lohan go to get some control of the crazed situation back?

Why the Internet, of course, with a pretty funny video of a spoof of an eHarmony online dating ad that is now a big hit on the comedy Web site, Funny or Die.

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In a BoomTown post last night noting that users should just get used to not having much control of their privacy and posted content online, in the wake of the controversy over Facebook’s Terms of Service changes, how could one leave out this gem of a digital diatribe on the issue by gossipmonger supreme, Perez Hilton?

In an item yesterday, Hilton–who has gotten into a lot of copyright infringement legal trouble himself–asked his fans to boycott the fast-growing social-networking site anyway in one of my favorite pot-calling-kettle-black cyber-tussles yet.

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I had an entertaining lunch with Owen Thomas and Megan McCarthy, both of Valleywag, the Silicon Valley online gossip rag that is part of the Gawker Media blogging empire.
(Megan had asked for some advice about the fine art of covering parties–that is, making an interesting story where there is not one–since I started my career [...]

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