So, BoomTown–who cannot be unplugged from the matrix for very long without breaking into a cold sweat–was pretty excited to have free Wi-Fi on my Virgin America flight to Washington, D.C., early this morning.

Lots of Web companies are footing the bill for people to use wireless for free, in an attempt to boost use and, of course, their brand.

While that should be a given in this country, I won’t look a digital gift horse in the mouth.

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While Nicki Dugan (pictured here) was not one of the top execs at Yahoo, she certainly is typical of many at the company who stuck with it through many ups and downs.

No longer, according to a memo BoomTown obtained, since the longtime PR staffer–who has been at Yahoo for almost a decade and who was previously with an outside public relations firm that worked for Yahoo–will leave the company Monday.

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Perhaps the sides in the ever-escalating war over the Skype deal will work out their differences and settle–which is what should and probably will eventually happen after everyone realizes how stupid all this noisy legal wrangling over the Internet telephony giant is.

But that day is decidedly not today, given a pair of recent big-gun PR hires by parties involved.

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New Yahoo Marketing head Elisa Steele named a colleague from her former job, NetApp, as SVP of Global Communications at the Internet giant.

Eric Brown was the VP of corporate relations at the data storage company, on whose board Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has also served. Before that, he was at Adaptec.

And, according to Yahoo’s internal memo, Brown likes to eat ice cream in bed while reading a Kindle and surfing the Web.

Scooch over and make some room for BoomTown, Eric!

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Jill Nash, Yahoo’s chief communications officer, has told CEO Carol Bartz and other Yahoo staff this afternoon that she is leaving the company.

Nash, sources said, told staff that she does not have any plans to move to another company immediately, so the reasons for her departure are unclear.

BoomTown would have to guess that Nash is simply completely spent from her past two years at Yahoo, which have been very fraught from a public relations perspective, to say the least.

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Last night, BoomTown was at the Horn Group offices in San Francisco to appear on a lively panel called “Is Social Media Killing PR?”

Focused on the “future of the media ecosystem,” it was inspired by recent blog rants by Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, all of whom have taken potshots at the PR industry as unnecessary or broken in the new social media order.

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