That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.

Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.

Just smaller and cuter.

So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.

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Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell Valleywag’s always controversial gossip blogger, Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.” Deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate is his replacement.

Here are Thomas’s last words on the controversial gossip site.

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New MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta starts his first day on the job at MySpace bright and early this morning, coming to its Beverly Hills HQ as he takes over for co-founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe.

Along with him will also be a new COO, former AOL exec Mike Jones, whose appointment will be announced this morning, sources said.

Jones was the founder of Userplane, a social-networking application maker that was bought by then-AOL head Jon Miller in 2006. Miller is now the digital chief at News Corp., which owns MySpace.

With a strong product and technology background, Jones is an excellent choice to be a partner to Van Natta–who was hired by Miller last week in a flurry of change at the social-networking site.

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In Web years, BoomTown is now officially 143 years old.

Why? Well, I was the one who got to write the big Page One piece in The Wall Street Journal after GeoCities was sold to Yahoo in January of 1999 for $5 billion in stock.

GeoCities was, in its way, the Facebook of its time. But, instead of “friends,” its users were “homesteaders.”

As Cher so eloquently sings: Those were the days my friend, we thought they’d never end.

Except they did. Yahoo announced yesterday that it was closing the GeoCities unit down, part of new CEO Carol Bartz’s war against useless assets at the troubled company.

But let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?

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As of today, we have made important changes to the All Things Digital Voices section.

Why? Well, a few weeks ago, ATD was caught up in a bit of the controversy that broke out due to louder-than-usual complaints by several traditional media companies about how their content is treated on the Web.

Without going into a long explanation: They expressed displeasure that some sites were misusing their content via aggregation. Those complaining included the editor-in-chief of Dow Jones, which owns this site.

The ensuing debate made us realize we needed to be a lot clearer and more explicit about what we are doing in our Voices section, which includes short excerpts of third-party content from outside our site, and to make those policies more prominent and transparent.

Some will disagree with the changes we have made and some will not think they go far enough. But we hope we have addressed the key issues.

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About three weeks ago, BoomTown surmised that the they’re-practically-giving-them-away prices for some prime but distressed tech companies–combined with cash hordes by stronger players–would eventually result in some acquisition activity sooner than later.

One combination I flagged most prominently, based on several sources, was that IBM would try to grab Sun Microsystems.

And today, The Wall Street Journal reported that that was indeed the case. Such a deal has been long rumored in Silicon Valley, so I wasn’t the first to suggest such an obvious move, and these talks come as a surprise to very few, which would rescue the long-declining Sun and give heft to IBM’s Internet aims.

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Even in the midst of the economic meltdown as prices for acquisition goodies decline, tech companies are keeping their mega-billion-dollar cash hordes warm and dry.

When will they open the purse strings? Or will Oracle’s Larry Ellison be the only hey-big-spender out there in the months ahead?

And when do you think tech companies should commence to gobbling?

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Here’s a chart from a not-entirely-unexpected story in The Wall Street Journal today chronicling how the “deepening recession is speeding up the shakeout in Silicon Valley, forcing droves of start-ups to shut down or sell themselves at fire-sale prices.”

You knew that was coming, didn’t you?

And here is a not-so-lovely pair of charts to show you why.

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With the naming of Oracle President Charles Phillips to President Barack Obama’s 16-Member Economic Recovery Advisory Board a few days ago, another Silicon Valley tech mandarin fell off the list to become America’s first chief technology officer.

The job–which was promised by President Barack Obama during his campaign and underscored when he released a memorandum on transparency and open government that outlined some of the CTO duties the day after he was sworn in–remains unfilled.

While everyone is rightly focusing on the economic crisis, inquiring minds still want to know who is getting the job as head geek.

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Many years ago in the midst of the Web 1.0 boom, when working as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, BoomTown redubbed an annual dinner that book agent John Brockman threw at the TED conference.

It was jokingly called the “Millionaires’ Dinner,” but I renamed it the “Billionaires’ Dinner.”

That was due to the frothy fortunes that had been made at the time by the Internet pioneers, from Amazon to AOL to eBay. Get it?!?

Well, despite the economic meltdown, there were still a lot of billionaires in attendance at Brockman’s most recent dinner last Thursday in Long Beach. But he recounted to me that the proceedings were a lot more focused on the serious times we are in, as was the whole digerati-packed conference held last week.

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Here is a story, in full, by the always terrific G. Pascal Zachary, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal in 1992, about the newly hired CEO Carol Bartz and the “theocracy of hackers” at then-wacky Autodesk.

Three guesses about who eventually won that battle, and the first two don’t count.

Fast-forward to 2008, with Bartz now taking up the difficult reins of Yahoo, which is a little more behaved than Autodesk was then, but still a handful.

Déjà vu anyone?

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In an article in The Wall Street Journal today comes the news that “President-elect Barack Obama’s call to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure has cable and phone company lobbyists maneuvering to get a leg up.”

To BoomTown, this is akin to Scrooge making his overnight transformation, except without any soul, sincerity or true intent to actually care about the consumer.

God help us, everyone.

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BoomTown really does hope that in some secret airport hangar right now Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang are meeting, in order to hammer out a fair search deal that will benefit them both. I’d even insist that Yahoo’s noisiest board member, activist shareholder Carl Icahn, be there too, to make sure all sides were copacetic and there would be no last-minute switcheroos and backstabbings. Because, long ago in galaxy far, far away, what is now going on between Microsoft and Yahoo would have seemed inane.

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Earlier this week, in a piece about Yahoo layoffs, BoomTown reiterated the notion that Yahoo would pick its next CEO to replace its current leader Jerry Yang from its own board or some dark horse CEO, rather than one of the Web’s more high-profile players.

The Wall Street Journal raised such a name in a piece today–former Vodafone Group CEO Arun Sarin.

It’s an intriguing idea, to be sure, since Sarin meets the list of six key criteria the board has created, including having public company CEO experience.

But there are other dark horses who fit that bill.

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The stock seesaw for Yahoo–fueled this time by a story in The Wall Street Journal that claimed that former AOL CEO Jon Miller was buttonholing private equity firms for money to buy the Internet giant–continues.

Yahoo shares rose seven percent due to the report, to $11.50, up 76 cents.

Unfortunately for everyone but stock manipulators, the Journal story had a lot of problems, including the highly pertinent fact that Miller has not been actively working on such a deal with any more effort that he had been over the last six months.

“Nothing is different now than it was last week, or even months ago,” said one person close to the situation.

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