Yesterday, in what feels to BoomTown to be a deeply petty move, Time Warner said that it had blocked former AOL head Jon Miller from being considered as a possible Yahoo board member.

The reason is a noncompete Miller signed, part of a severance agreement he reached with the media giant after it unceremoniously tossed him out in late 2006.

A Time Warner spokesman said Miller was barred from working “for a variety of competitors, including Yahoo, until March of 2009.”

Like it matters.

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After its annual meeting today, as Yahoo board members had lunch together, Yahoo released the unsurprising results of its shareholder vote and it seems we will still have Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang to kick around some more.

Yang garnered 85.4 percent of the shares to stay on as a director of the Internet company, with 18.2 percent withheld.

While having almost 20 percent of your investors think you are not worthy is not good, it is also not nearly as bad as it could have been.

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Earlier this week, BoomTown posted our speaker list for the sixth edition of D: All Things Digital, which will take place in a few weeks–May 27 to 29, to be exact–in Carlsbad, Calif.

Just recently, we added Jerry Yang, CEO and co-founder of Yahoo, and now he is being joined onstage at the conference by Yahoo President Sue Decker (pictured here in a lovely Wall Street Journal dot-drawing).

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Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft (MSFT). News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch. Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner (TWX). Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jerry Yang.
All of them engaged in roiling Internet deal-making of late and all of them in just three weeks on the same stage–but not, thankfully, at the same time, or we’d need a professional [...]

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One of the most overlooked parts of Web companies are their board members, so I think it is time to start looking more carefully at those firms where the role of directors is going to be increasingly important in 2008.

First stop, obviously, is Yahoo, which reports its fourth quarter and also full year earnings (and also perhaps some board-approved layoffs) tomorrow after the markets close.

With everything from consistently persistent takeover rumors, a still-lagging stock price and continued scrutiny on its moves to revive itself, the company’s managers and–it must be assumed–its directors obviously face challenges in the year ahead.

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