Another former Yahoo exec has landed at a Silicon Valley venture firm. This time, well-regarded serial entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj will become a partner at Redpoint Ventures, according to sources.

The move of Dharmaraj is interesting, given that he is not starting a new company or taking a post as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm, which many operating execs do after leaving a company.

Sources close to the situation said Dharmaraj would focus on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure at Redpoint.

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BoomTown’s visit to Italy has been eye-opening in a lot of ways, not the least of which is to be reminded that not everyone in the world is jacked into the matrix 24/7.

In other words, Julius Caesar conquered Rome, but Twitter definitely has not.

In fact, the conference being held here is aptly called “Tutto Cambio, Cambiamo Tutto?” That roughly translates into “Everything changes, let’s change everything?”

This is not a question that is much asked in Silicon Valley. But here, whether or not to change is much more of a debate–one in which change does not always come out on top.

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BoomTown is winging toward Italy this weekend to participate in an interesting gathering about digital and other issues related to innovation.

The once-every-seven-year conference focuses on disruption and change, with the event titled: “Tutto cambia? Cambiamo tutto?”

That roughly translates to: Everything changes. But do we change everything?”

Si, cari i miei geek italiani!

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Last week, I went to the 15th Stanford Accel Symposium, hosted by Stanford University’s MediaX and the VC firm Accel Partners.

With the honking big title of “The Delta Conference: The Impact of 2008 Dramatic Events on the World of Digital Media and Technology,” it included a panel on online media with a stellar gang, all talking about microblogging, content and where it is all going in this economic environment.

It was kind of like “The View,” except all guys in khakis and oxford shirts. You know, a typical Silicon Valley gathering.

Here are video interviews with the panelists.

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Last night, well-known Internet entrepreneur Marc Andreessen appeared on the “Charlie Rose” interview show, talking about the digital sector and unveiling the news that he is creating a new venture fund.

I had heard rumblings about Andreessen’s funding efforts earlier this week, with sources I talked to jokingly nicknaming it “Project A.”

Actually, Andreessen said the new firm is called Andreessen Horowitz (zzzz), because he is doing it with longtime investing partner Ben Horowitz.

“For the first time in my life, I am crossing over into the dark side,” said Andreessen.

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While at the TED conference last week, I asked a variety of people in attendance at the elite gathering which presentation had blown their head off–figuratively, of course!

TED, which feels like a four-year college in four days, had an eclectic range of speakers, many focusing on the awful state of the earth. But there were also less-dire presentations, such as one on how Brad Pitt’s head and range of facial expressions are now stored in a Sony database for all eternity.

That’s a cold comfort amid all the global melting down, but BoomTown will not refuse it.

Here’s some more TED reaction from the digerati.

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Yesterday, the one-man-band of a tech blogger, Michael Arrington, let loose with yet another outrageously indignant diatribe–this time that he and his TechCrunch site would forthwith break all news embargoes. Not content with the traffic generated last week by his obviously faked Wrestlemania bout with French entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur about the lazy-lunching Europeans, he moved on to a riff on PR people versus journalists. (What next for the Geraldo Rivera of investigative tech blogging? A withering prosecution of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang in the HOV lane on Highway 101 in Sunnyvale without a hybrid? Quelle scandale!)

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Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman will become CEO of LinkedIn again, taking on the job he had for nearly four years after founding the business networking company in 2003. Hoffman replaces current CEO Dan Nye, who has resigned and will leave the company in mid-January. More interesting in the shift is the appointment of former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner as interim president, overseeing day-to-day operations at LinkedIn.

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Here’s an interesting site, created by an ex-Yahoo for ex-Yahoos to help them find jobs. Launched today by Ryan Kuder (along with a non-Yahoo, Jonathan Tarud), it’s called the Purple People Collective. Purple, of course, is the main color at Yahoo and “bleed purple” is one of its more unfortunate favorite expressions. Kuder, if you will recall, did a very funny Twitter stream about his own layoff in February

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BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

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Yahoo–which has stuck to its guns by staying in the search business, even though many think it is a losing game and should be sold off to Microsoft–has lost a key engineer in that arena to–uh-oh–Microsoft.

Sean Suchter, the VP of Search Technology at Yahoo, was also deeply involved in Yahoo’s efforts to open up its search platform, initiatives the company has touted aggressively as a bright spot in its not-so-lustrous landscape.

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Microsoft officially rolled out its next version of its Windows Live Services tonight, with a heavy emphasis on socializing its online offerings and giving users better tools to share all sorts of information from across the Web within them.

Microsoft said the changes–similar to those made by Yahoo and AOL recently–would “begin rolling out to customers in the U.S. over the coming weeks and will be made available globally in 54 countries and in 48 languages by early 2009.”

You might call this the “Facebooking” of Windows Live, which is the brand name for Microsoft’s communications and other related online services aimed at consumers, especially because the much anticipated changes also include a new profile and a “What’s New” feed.

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Happy days aren’t here again, it seems.

Still, I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile on Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur’s face, which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs.

In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

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In a move BoomTown is still trying to noodle over, longtime Facebook exec Matt Cohler (pictured here) will be leaving the social networking site to become a general partner at Benchmark Capital.

Cohler, who is currently Facebook’s VP of Product Management, was one of its earliest hires and, as I wrote once, seemed to me like “the Yoda figure at Facebook to me.”

He will not leave the prominent social networking company for the venture capital firm until the fall, though.

And, after he goes, Cohler will remain as a “special advisor” to Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and senior management.

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Back in November, I did a video interview with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye about the fast-growing, in-play business social network.

We talked about the future of LinkedIn and what it all means.

As BoomTown noted then, LinkedIn was the “‘professional’ social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook.”

But that more dour productivity image certainly did not prevent it from getting a very happy $1 billion valuation yesterday and $53 million in new funding.

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