Yesterday, writing about executive stress at Yahoo, BoomTown posted about the swirling speculation around the fate of Jeff Weiner, the Network division EVP, who many at Yahoo think will soon be headed out the door after his recent paternity leave of four weeks.

Now, several sources in Silicon Valley’s voluble venture community confirm the high-ranking exec has been offered and seems likely to accept a spot splitting his time as an executive in residence at two firms–Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

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Yahoo’s board has been meeting today and, doubtlessly, its directors had a lot to talk about (more on that later!).

Of course, there’s the obvious topic of having to figure out how best to deal with the noisy stylings of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who is waging a proxy war on Yahoo and calling for new management at the top.

But perhaps what the board should be focused on is the old management at Yahoo, especially in the levels just below the top, who have been operating the company under a lot of stress for far too long.

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Break out the sedatives, because Carl Icahn is getting mighty tetchy with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and the board of directors of the troubled Internet company!

In yet another letter to Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock, the ever-grumpier billionaire investor, who is waging a proxy fight against Yahoo and seeking to oust Yang and crew, he stepped up the volume to Crazy Eddie levels.

It’s almost too juicy to require translation, as the veins practically pop out in Icahn’s letter from all the agita he seems to be experiencing over this botched takeover.

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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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If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to also capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

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One of the more oft-repeated legends I am suddenly hearing lately from folks inside and close to Yahoo is of CEO Terry Semel getting and turning down what amounted to a $50 billion offer from Microsoft in early 2006.

The tale has become a bit of an urban legend within the company for some, who point to it as part of the complex web of reasons the Internet portal cannot seem to accept a lesser price now.

While I am not so sure that Yahoo is paralyzed by regret, such pricey possibilities from years past probably does have some weight today.

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BoomTown wrote a few weeks ago that Microsoft (MSFT) was fishing in Silicon Valley and also for “three to four big-name CEOs” for directors to nominate for its own Yahoo (YHOO) board slate, in the event the software giant took off the gloves and tried to oust Yahoo’s current board and replace [...]

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From our Monday post called “Say Hello to the Yahoo Board Members”:
Recently, [former CEO Terry] Semel revived his Los Angeles-based new media investment firm, Windsor Media, and rumors abound to his intentions–including possibly making a play for a Hollywood studio. Big question: Will Semel continue as chairman of Yahoo in 2008?…
“What to make of Roy [...]

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And can they ever get along?
At the SIIA Information Summit yesterday, New Yorker writer Ken Auletta, who recently did a piece on Google, noted:
We’re in an engineering culture. You couldn’t put a [Rupert] Murdoch or a [Michael] Eisner in charge of a company like that. It’s been tried. Terry Semel led Yahoo. I just spent [...]

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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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How glad BoomTown was to finally see Jerry Yang up close and personal, after our valiant but futile efforts to get near the Yahoo co-founder and CEO in 2007.

No, we’re not stalking him in a restraining-order kind of way, although I did stake a claim to a front row seat in the intimate theater at the Las Vegas Hilton for his keynote this morning at the Consumer Electronics Show, where Yang couldn’t help but see me.

Like he cared!

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They are getting very shy over there at Yahoo about the all-seeing eye of BoomTownCam. On my recent visit to the Internet giant’s New York office, its newly installed U.S. ad sales head David Karnstedt wouldn’t let me make one of my shaky-style, irksome videos of him. Europe head Toby Coppel also demurred recently.

I [...]

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So after this initial post yesterday, I had a chance to get a closer look at Yahoo’s earnings announcement and these are my four takeaways of its execs’ main points:
We know, it’s not good.
We have officially reached the bottom and things might even be looking up.
100 Days!
And no cows.

Sacred, that is, meaning no one at [...]

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Will this be the last shoe to drop–at least this month–at Yahoo?

Tomorrow, the struggling Internet search giant will announce its second quarter earnings at 5 p.m. EDT (2 p.m. PDT).
The company is expected to have no gain in profit year to year. That translates to 11 cents a share for the quarter on $1.24 billion [...]

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Eric Jackson, the effectively noisy shareholder advocate who prodded Terry Semel to leave Yahoo as CEO at its annual board meeting just days before he did, is now targeting Motorola and its CEO Ed Zander.
While Jackson runs a small operation, he uses his Web site, YouTube videos, posting to wikis and other online tools in [...]

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