If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Interent telephony that didn’t ever work as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005. Or the ugly lawsuits over it. Or the successful shakedown by its co-founders to get a big chunk back.

You get the idea.

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Tony Conrad, CEO and co-founder of Sphere–the contextually relevant content engine AOL bought in the spring of 2008 for upward of $25 million–left the Time Warner online unit last month, several sources have told BoomTown in recent weeks.

But, in an effort by AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong to hold onto entrepreneurial talent, Conrad has agreed to become “Special Advisor” to its AOL Ventures Unit.

Apparently, he is also mulling a new start-up and remains a VC too.

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According to sources close to the situation, Index Ventures and Michelangelo Volpi are out of the deal to buy Skype–and their lawsuit-loving nemeses, the founders of the Internet telephony service, are in.

More details to come, but it’s sure proof that the legal system, such as it was used, works.

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Yesterday, several Flickr engineers posted news of their layoffs from the Yahoo photo-sharing unit on Twitter, which caused GigaOm’s Om Malik to notice that Flickr architect Cal Henderson was also no longer on its About page.

According to several sources I spoke to, Henderson was actually not laid off at Yahoo, but is leaving to start a new company–in the social-gaming arena, I am told–with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

He and several other of the original core development team for Flickr transitioned out or have been transitioning out for quite some time, sources said.

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Is it just me or does the sudden prospect of venture capitalists–the very investors who fueled the Web 2.0 valuation insanity with their typically egregious overfunding of start-ups–lecturing about the bleak economy and the need to tighten belts seem just a tad ironic?

It’s kind of like Washington politicians who handed out-of-control bankers one deregulation after another in exchange for campaign donations now mounting their high horses and decrying Wall Street greed in the current economic meltdown.

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Someone get a dose of Ritalin stat to the noisy but deeply misguided critics who took news of a huge number of downloads of apps for the Apple iPhone and immediately concluded it was just not good enough.

Thus, as reported today in The Wall Street Journal, 60 million downloads in 30 days–mostly for free apps, but with about $30 million in revenue, and a runway of three million more new iPhones out there too–is a chance to talk about how it all is just so unexciting and how the apps market is officially saturated?

Am I missing something here? One would assume that were these pundits pioneers, they would get to Ohio and declare that going farther west held very little promise, thank you very much!

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In BoomTown’s ongoing quest to overdose on tech conferences, I traveled south of San Francisco last night for Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm: TECH conference.

Run by David Kirkpatrick, it’s well done and a great place to run into a range of techies from Silicon Valley, as well as talk to more creative thinkers on where tech is going.

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With all the Yahoo reorganization noise this past week–full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, if you want to go all literary!–BoomTown had little time to post our video on GigaOm’s Om Malik’s Structure 08 conference on Wednesday.

Held at the spanking new Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, it was high-wonk, packed with CTOs and those involved in building the guts of the Internet and its infrastructure, whose jobs are becoming more complicated than ever as Internet usage booms.

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Tonight, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters had nearly identical stories, noting that Microsoft was interested in buying Yahoo’s search business, which–oh, we bloggers are so touchy when we don’t get even a smidgen of credit, aren’t we?–BoomTown speculated was just what the software giant was interested in yesterday.

To be fair, both Reuters’ and The Journal’s reports make such a plan by Microsoft even more definitive and both have interesting new details, which are intriguing.

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Earlier this week, I had my good friend and longtime friendly rival New York Times reporter Matt Richtel and his wife to our house for dinner, where conversation turned to his controversial article about the health dangers of blogging.
“Ouch,” said Richtel about the reaction to the piece.

After its appearance in the Times, Richtel (pictured here) [...]

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For those heading into the weekend, don’t miss this post from tech blogger Om Malik (pictured here, but the cigar is now a thing of the past), assessing his life and work three months after he suffered a serious heart attack.
Titled “Off Topic: What the Past Three Months Have Taught Me,” it is actually quite [...]

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Here’s the most recent GigaOm show without Om! But, in the latest episode of the GigaOm Show on Revision3, Liz Gannes and Joyce Kim do a good job interviewing John Lilly, the new CEO of Mozilla.
I spent some time with Lilly at a conference in Hawaii last year (I know, boondoggle!) on a scavenger [...]

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Walt Mossberg and I had a lovely visit with Om Malik yesterday, a get-well-soon summit held at a Starbucks in San Francisco’s Financial District. It was the first time I have seen the well-liked tech blogger of GigaOm fame since he suffered a heart attack during the holidays.

Malik, who will not be smoking cigars any [...]

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Perhaps the only blogger who would have had the exact right take on this somewhat silly Scobleicious day of data portability debates is Om Malik.
Unfortunately for us and mostly for him, he has been sidelined by a sudden heart attack he suffered over the holidays that landed him in the hospital (in fact, Om actually [...]

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Yes, indeedy, this is about as insider as you get in Silicon Valley. But we are just addled enough by all the spiked eggnog we drank this weekend to think you might be interested in this video we did at a variety of industry holiday parties BoomTown attended.
They include a stop at angel investor Ron [...]

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