Allen Olivo, SVP of global brand marketing at Yahoo, is leaving the company, according to sources.

The high-level departure is the latest at Yahoo (YHOO), as major executive changes continue. It was announced today internally.

Yahoo confirmed the departure in a statement to BoomTown: “After more than three years at Yahoo!, Allen Olivo is leaving the company to pursue other interests. Allen has been a dedicated and valued member of the Yahoo! team and we wish him well in his future endeavors. Allen will remain at Yahoo! for a period of time in order to ensure a smooth transition.”

Olivo ran brand marketing for the Silicon Valley-based Internet giant, which is about to undergo a major new push under CEO Carol Bartz.

Olivo was reportedly up for the chief marketing officer job, which went to former NetApp (NTAP) marketing exec Elisa Steele recently.

Olivo joined Yahoo in early 2006 and has been responsible for “overseeing all aspects of its advertising and brand marketing strategy worldwide, including design and editorial.”

He’s worked at a variety of marketing jobs, including at the San Francisco Chronicle, Robertson Stephens, Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL).

Oh dear, oilman T. Boone Pickens has apparently been Yanged.

That sounds like something that would happen out on the back 40 of a Texas ranch that no one in the clan ever discusses in polite company.

Actually, losing about $50 million is also something moneymen like Pickens don’t like to talk about either, even if he is as rich as can be.

Of course, in dumping his 10 million shares so precipitously, Pickens’s parting shot showed exactly what Yahoo’s big weakness is as the company heads into its annual meeting this Friday: an increasingly depressed stock.

Indeed, because of Pickens’s departure as an investor, Yahoo (YHOO) shares dropped just below the dangerous $20 a share level yesterday to $19.71, not far off the $19.18 price that prompted Microsoft (MSFT) to attack in February.

Yahoo shares are now just holding onto the edge at $20.05 this morning.

This is perhaps Yahoo’s biggest external problem. While the stock has shown resilience of really dipping to the mid-teens, if the shares drop that far, Pickens will look attractive compared with the kind of vulture investors who will show up to pick at Yahoo.

While Yahoo’s assets add up to $20 or more per share on a cash basis, staying above this threshold has largely been predicated on the fact that investors imagine some deal, any deal, between Yahoo and Microsoft in the future.

Such a deal might be the right move, but investors should probably accept the fact that it might never happen and that Yahoo and Microsoft will keep their digital efforts solo.

That’s the trap Pickens wandered right into like a particularly clueless bear.

And while Pickens took aim at Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang at an editorial board meeting with the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, noting, “I think that Yahoo management was pathetic,” the fault is entirely Pickens’s own in greedily following along with activist investor and longtime crony Carl Icahn.

Pickens had bought a pile of shares in May, after Icahn announced his intention to wage a proxy fight against Yahoo and force it into a sale of some sort to Microsoft.

One problem: Yahoo and Microsoft execs did not go along with the grand idea of enriching either Pickens or Icahn, who aren’t exactly digitally inclined.

That’s no negative really, except to say that the Internet space is not quite the same as oil or, really, most other industries yet.

Despite the struggles of Yahoo and Microsoft against the more powerful Google (GOOG), the Internet remains a fast-growing industry with many options.

In other words, not quite ripe enough for takeover artists’, well, pickin’.

That’s why I deserve the round of merciless teasing I got from them when I suddenly decided I had to have one, too–after a weak moment in the Apple store in the Grove in Los Angeles.

Like a lot of others, I was also nervous about it being Apple’s 1.0 version (and was trying to heed tech’s No. 1 caveat that you should always wait for 2.0 at least). But after playing with it even more, I also quickly realized it was like every other cellphone’s–and I have had them all–16.0 version, so much improved that other issues (yes, the poor AT&T wireless network) seemed less significant.

Perhaps I should have just stuck to my knitting, as seen here in a very funny post on Daddy Types, which is a blog apparently aimed at new fathers.

Given the massive falloff in business, why shouldn’t print just pack it in? Jon Fine of BusinessWeek in his Media Centric column this week poses that important question in a provocative piece.

Play with me on this one: Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?”

He names the San Francisco Chronicle as the guinea pig. Along with its money-losing status, Fine also notes that it exists in a plugged-in city ripe to support a large online business dependent on ad dollars.

And here’s a good video from Wall Street Journal Video about using digital tools to get a better golf club:

And let me just say after a week in the wilds of Yosemite, it’s as crowded there as in the big city, as you can read in this disturbing story from the San Francisco Chronicle this weekend on the traffic jam to reach the summit of the famous and breathtaking Half Dome. As you can see by this stunning photo by Michael Maloney, getting away from it all is a bit harder than it seems and a whole lot more dangerous (there have been a few recent and obviously fatal falls on the cables going up the last stretch of the climb).

Wimp that I thankfully am, I did not try this trek and stuck to clambering over the slippery rocks under picturesque waterfalls, even as I desperately tried to catch an errant wireless signal.

Mostly, it was to no avail, and I thank the comment on my whiny post on my journey to the land of beauty and no-digital-connection that pointed out where I could jack in.

Indeed, I did manage to sign on at the lovely and historic Ahwahnee hotel there, where my family stayed for two nights after too much dust-choked and mosquito-plagued rustic cabin camping.

But, to assuage another commenter who wished I would learn to commune with nature more and my computer less, I did have a killer view of Half Dome as I microprocessed from a very comfy chair about one foot off the ground.