(Also, while there is only a 54 percent chance of being lectured to by the Big Brains of Google, there is a 100 percent chance of both free comic books and tasty organic snacks!)

And Chrome, the shiny code name of the project, which has stuck as the brand name, will also be going out to the world at large–100 countries, that is–right after that.

BoomTown is bringing the trusty Flip video camera to make some Silicon Valley memories, and will render a full report about what’s what.

But until then, I have decided to forgo writing the expected long, long, long, long what-the-new-Google-browser-represents-for-geekkind thumbsucker.

Instead, here is my three-part short version about Google’s new piece of open-source software to navigate the Internet, using my favored cultural references:

1.) Google=Red cape and and way too many picador lances. Microsoft=Really angry bull (not at all flower-sniffing Ferdinand-like).

2.) Remember “War Games” and the then-cute Matthew Broderick as teen nerd David Lightman, playing Global Thermonuclear War with the supercomputer called Joshua, and then being told the consequences of that by head government techie John McKittrick (Dabney Coleman)?

If not, here’s some dialog from the movie that is now apt, if you imagine Google (GOOG) as David and Microsoft (MSFT) as Joshua:

McKittrick: See that sign up here–up here. “Defcon.” That indicates our current defense condition. It should read “Defcon 5,” which means peace. It’s still on 4 because of that little stunt you pulled. Actually, if we hadn’t caught it in time, it might have gone to Defcon 1. You know what that means, David?
David Lightman: No. What does that mean?
McKittrick: World War Three.

3.) And, last, if Google’s Chrome browser does not take off on all the hot-air hype, isn’t outstanding as a product and does not make a substantial dent in Microsoft’s overwhelming market share in the browser market, I’d point to one of the best opening lines from “Sunset Boulevard”–the one with Joe Gillis (William Holden) narrating about himself post-mortem as a floating corpse:

“The poor dope–he always wanted a pool. Well, in the end, he got himself a pool.”

Well, Google has got itself an Olympic-sized pool now!

We kid! Google’s in no danger of foundering, given that its search business still dominates, and quite profitably, of course.

But for all the halo of that, Google has never had any other similar true home run with any of the other products it has released so far.

And to portray Chrome as a Windows killer–which some are quite incorrectly doing–is not the kind of image Google should encourage.

Nonetheless, with this move, the search giant has certainly stepped into the spotlight more than it ever has (and this is a company that–let’s be honest–never misses a chance to frolic and show off in that spotlight).

So, with these loftier ambitions, I think it is fair to say that this time Google had better be ready to actually perform better than Michael Phelps.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

I met John Lilly last October on a decidedly odd techie scavenger hunt in Hawaii–trapped in a van all day while searching for tikis and such, as if we were a geek Brady Bunch (yes, BoomTown works that hard for you)–and found him to be just the kind of quietly intelligent, thoughtful and self-effacing digital exec that Silicon Valley could use a lot more of in these often frivolous, look-at-me Web 2.0 days.

Soon after, in January, he was named CEO of Mozilla Corporation, after serving as its COO. Lilly took over from Mitchell Baker, who remains Mozilla’s chairman.

The open-source software nonprofit foundation, also a for-profit start-up, is most famous for its red dragon logo and, more importantly, its increasingly popular Firefox browser, whose share has steadily increased since it debuted in late 2004.

Here’s my video interview with him about what’s next:

Firefox now has about an 18-percent share, which has climbed from 11 percent just two years ago–against Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer browser juggernaut with 74 percent and Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser with 6 percent.

Mozilla’s recent launch of Firefox 3 should help it grow further, even though IE 8 will soon emerge out of beta too.

But on its record-setting debut day in mid-June, there were 8.3 million downloads of Firefox 3 in 24 hours. Current overall downloads have just moved past 50 million.

That means more money in the bank, although mostly from Google (GOOG), which pays Mozilla royalties for Google ad clicks that come from Firefox searches (Google is the default search box on the browser).

All is not sunshine and daisies, of course.

Besides having to keep up the innovation, Mozilla also has to keep up its technical prowess–despite the fact that it is not likely to go public and shower employees with giant gobs of overhyped stock, given its unusual status as both a profit and nonprofit.

In addition, in case you haven’t noticed, the start-up game is still rocking and it remains awfully enticing to jump into the ever-crowded pool.

For example, Mozilla lost Engineering VP Mike Schroepfer last week to Facebook, where he will be the social-networking site’s director of engineering.

But Lilly took that departure calmly, wishing him well in a classy way on his own blog, just as he seems to do most things.

Before John Lilly got the CEO job at Mozilla Corporation, I had visited the HQ of the the open-source software nonprofit foundation and also a for-profit start-up–famous for its increasingly popular Firefox browser (logo pictured here) and red dragon logo–on Landings Drive in Mountain View.

I toured the place and took video note of a freakishly large sculpture made of soda cans and the biggest couch I have ever seen. In other words, just another typical Silicon Valley company.

Here’s an inside look at Mozilla HQ:

This week, I had lunch with one of the nicest young Web entrepreneurs around the scene, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

We use a custom WordPress.com installation for this site, which has worked out well for us, and the start-up also hosts AllThingsD.com. We also got a very nice hoodie.

In all seriousness, the company started as an open-source blogging software project at WordPress.org with Mullenweg as founding developer, while WordPress.com is for-profit and is run by Mullenweg and others at a start-up called Automattic.

Mullenweg came to San Francisco from his hometown of Houston to work on WordPress and other projects for CNET in 2004. He left a year later to work full-time on the development of WordPress.

It and others like it quickly rode the wave of an ever-growing trend of self-publishing, which has been increasingly embraced by both the single person writing about their cat to the large-scale media companies looking to develop more dynamic properties online.

WordPress and Automattic (which also runs Akismet, an anti-comment and trackback spam software service) has been the frequent target of takeover speculation.

But, while Automattic has reportedly considered those options, as well as hooking up with other companies like Sphere (which was just bought for $35 million in cash by AOL [TWX]), Mullenweg seems just as determined to build out his simple publishing platform, by adding ad networks and all sorts of bells and whistles to the offerings.

In fact, WordPress competitor Six Apart did just that last week with its acquisition of the New York-based ad, design and consulting services firm Apperceptive.

So I will bet Mullenweg probably has some news of his own, when he gives a short speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this morning.

We’ll see, but in this video, Mullenweg talks with BoomTown–after we admit to an obvious man crush on him–about the progress in the blog-publishing arena and where it is all going.

Here’s the video:

Yahoo (YHOO) has been accelerating its open activities of late, mostly related to its search and ad infrastructure.

But, in his appearance at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco next Thursday morning at a keynote speech titled “Yahoo and Open Platforms,” sources said Yahoo CTO Ari Balogh (pictured here) will sketch out a more significant broadening out of its open platform plans, which would touch consumers more directly.

That could include opening up everything from communications tools like mail to content to all sorts of products Yahoo offers its users to third-party developers.

In addition, the company plans to make as much of those and its own offerings more distributed, sending it all back out to the Web.

This kind of conceptual shift is something many have felt Yahoo has needed to do in a bolder manner, as consumer interest in massive centralized portals like Yahoo has waned.

The move, in many ways, has shades of what Facebook did last year when it opened its platform up to third-party developers, but also includes a vision of a more widgetized and social Yahoo, and a Yahoo available everywhere.

While Yahoo will not specify a date when all this will roll out, sources said Yahoo had hoped to have much of it in place by the end of the year.

This increasingly massive job of opening up more and more of the Yahoo platform to third-party developers and make its own products, APIs, code and content more highly distributed is being led by Balogh.

Balogh came to Yahoo from VeriSign, just days before Microsoft (MSFT) leveled its unsolicited takeover bid at the company.

Working with Yahoo Co-Founder and tech guru David Filo, Balogh has been given high marks from many sources I talked to within the company for bringing a faster-paced style than under longtime Yahoo CTO Farzad Nazem, who retired a year ago.

At the time, many felt Yahoo’s technology efforts had drifted under Nazem, whose internal nickname was “Zod,” as BoomTown reported back in June of 2007.

Setbacks in its Panama project to rehaul its online search-ad technology and a slowness in focusing on Web 2.0 distributed technologies have clearly contributed to Yahoo’s current predicament, in which its long-suffering stock declined enough to give Microsoft an opportunity to make its move on Yahoo.

Under that backdrop, Balogh is under intense pressure to deliver on one of CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang’s key focuses for Yahoo that he reiterated in a letter he sent on Feb. 14 to shareholders after Yahoo rejected Microsoft’s offer.

Underscoring the need to make Yahoo a “starting point” and a “must-buy” ad platform, Yang noted: “These key strategies will be enhanced by our adoption of new, more open technology platforms that will encourage the development of new applications and the involvement of third-party developers–and help enrich the user experience.”

While it does not get the credit it probably deserves, Yahoo has been moved squarely into the open-source space and, in fact, has made a series of announcements since the Microsoft bid from its implementation of Apache’s Hadoop in its search product to its support of the Google-led OpenSocial initiative to its recently announced AMP!, an ad-management software shipping this summer.

AMP!, said Yahoo, would allow “ad networks, through an open set of APIs, to innovate on top of the transparent marketplace.”

Yahoo Technology Evangelist Jeremy Zawodny might have signaled even more announcements in his well-read blog in mid-March, in fact, when he noted that Yahoo was a longtime proponent of open platforms and open-source technology.

Wrote Zawodny, who declined to speak to me yesterday about any further open initiatives, due to its quiet period around earnings next week, wrote on March 14:

“We’ve been on the openness road for a long, long time at Yahoo. And we take it rather seriously. Sometimes it hasn’t been as visible as others, but believe me, the trend is quite clear when you look at all the data. The Open Source adoption and work. The APIs. The way we communicate with users and partners. The Blogs. The RSS feeds…You’ll be reading more and hearing more about openness at Yahoo from me and Yahoo’s much higher up the food chain in the coming months.

Anyone who knows me knows that I come from open source roots and am a big proponent of opening things up more and more. I’d have left Yahoo years ago if I didn’t see it happening.”

Added Zawodny with some mystery: “If you think the last few weeks are big, you haven’t seen anything yet! “

Former Yahoo Senior Vice President Tim Cadogan will take the CEO job at OpenX, the popular open-source ad server start-up, backed by Index Ventures, Accel Partners and others.

As part of the change, the company will move from its London HQ to Los Angeles. OpenX has about 30 employees, including 10 developers in Poland, but not all will be moving West.

Cadogan was with Yahoo (YHOO) for five years, in its search unit and later as SVP for ad products, including playing an important role in the launch of its Panama ad search product. Previously, he was an early member of the GoTo.com team and went to Yahoo just before it acquired Overture.

Cadogan will now run OpenX (which recently changed its name from OpenAds), which makes the leading open-source ad serving software, catering to about 30,000 Web publishers on 100,000 Web sites in more than 100 countries.

Until now, OpenX has been helmed by James Bilefield, another former Yahoo exec, who was also VP of Global Business Development and GM of European operations for Skype.

OpenX has raised about $21 million in funding since 2007. Besides Index and Accel, other investors include First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Former AOL head Jon Miller also recently joined its board as chairman.

“With open-source software, there is a lot of potential for business disruption and to open up the market,” said Cadogan in an interview with BoomTown from London. “You have not really seen open-source models really applied to the ad space until now…but there is a big business in giving publishers a really robust offering and a platform where they can also share what they build.”

Backed by Benchmark Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Accel Partners, San Mateo, Calif.-based Zimbra’s clients include Comcast, many ISPs and a number of colleges. The Wall Street Journal’s Robert A. Guth wrote about the company last year.

In a post by Om Malik on his GigaOm blog, he noted: “The Zimbra-built email client marries the email and calendaring applications with visual voicemail, and eventually will tie into other Comcast triple-play services.”

Yahoo’s been on a bit of an acquistion roll of late, grabbing behavioral ad network BlueLithium for $300 million earlier this month and news aggregator BuzzTracker last week for $5 million.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang continues on his 100-day march–and now seems to be making a number of interesting moves.

The acquisition was within Yahoo Senior Vice President Brad “Peanut Butter Manifesto” Garlinghouse’s unit.

Yahoo is briefing reporters today on the deal, but left BoomTown off the list. Big mistake, as it just makes us cranky and bored!