Essentially–although AOL is located in New York and not California–it’s going to be like tremors before the Big One at the online company today as about 100 employees are set to be laid off by management.

It is part of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s “Project Everest”–the code name for cost-cutting across the company. After this small cut, there could be a call for voluntary departures, followed by a much more drastic layoff.

The action comes in the same timeframe as the online site’s spinoff from Time Warner.

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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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It wasn’t just Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer meeting in New York last week.

According to several sources close to the situation, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes rounded out the trio of chit-chatting execs, presumably gathered to discuss possible partnerships and other deals between and amongst the companies whose digital assets are among the largest on the Web.

Although the possibilities are numerous, exactly what Bostock, Ballmer and Bewkes–let’s call them the Busy B’s from here on out–were cooking up is unclear.

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There it was again–like the gnarly ghost of Christmas past–in the Los Angeles Times this week. But this time Lloyd Braun wasn’t going to take it anymore. The object of his ire was dropped right in the middle of a blog post about how Yahoo was “reversing its Hollywoodification” at its Santa Monica media unit offices. The piece also included old allegations from a devastating story in November of 2005 about Braun, which made him look like a digital version of Ari Gold from “Entourage.” Unfortunately, as BoomTown has found out, the bulk of those juicy anecdotes about him don’t actually check out. And therein lies a complex tale that still reverberates at Yahoo today.

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While layoffs have become all too common across tech and this country, today’s at Yahoo feel a little worse, coming after 18 unceasing months of painful changes and stumbles at the troubled Internet icon. As previously reported by BoomTown, about 10 percent of Yahoo’s workforce–1,500–are expected to get their walking papers, starting this morning. I have gotten more than a dozen impassioned emails from Yahoo employees, some of whom are there and some who have left, this week alone–all of whom truly care for the company, in spite of obvious anger.

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Yesterday, BoomTown reported, based on sources, that Yahoo search exec Sean Suchter was headed to Microsoft.

Now it’s official. Here’s a Microsoft statement on the hiring of Suchter, an important tech leader at Yahoo, from Satya Nadella, SVP for Search, Portal and Advertising.

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Yahoo–which has stuck to its guns by staying in the search business, even though many think it is a losing game and should be sold off to Microsoft–has lost a key engineer in that arena to–uh-oh–Microsoft.

Sean Suchter, the VP of Search Technology at Yahoo, was also deeply involved in Yahoo’s efforts to open up its search platform, initiatives the company has touted aggressively as a bright spot in its not-so-lustrous landscape.

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Here’s one certainty in the hubbub that has resulted in the wake of the departure of high-profile exec Ben Ling from Facebook last week: COO Sheryl Sandberg is definitely not responsible for the melting of the polar ice caps.

That’s the joking question–Was global warming Sandberg’s fault too?–that was asked at a staff meeting at the social networking start-up last Friday afternoon, after the news of Ling’s departure, on the heels of some other previous employee exits, suddenly morphed into a series of increasingly vituperative posts on the Valleywag tech gossip site that all centered on what blogger Owen Thomas called Sandberg’s “reign of terror” at Facebook.

The truth of the situation, though, is actually a lot more interesting.

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Ben Ling–the high-profile Facebook platform exec who came from Google less than a year ago and then up and left the social-networking site earlier this week–is heading back to Google, this time taking a job leading monetization efforts at YouTube, according to sources.

On Tuesday, it was reported here that Ling was leaving his job at Facebook, where he has been director of platform product marketing.

It is a move that will surely spur many to rev up the Facebook-versus-Google stories, given that several Google execs have been recruited by Facebook over the last year.

Apparently, the Empire does strike back.

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Despite the noise around the Yahoo/Google deal and the end of the Microsoft talks, attrition among Yahoo’s top executive ranks continues. Another executive departure will be announced today at 2 p.m. PDT. Dr. Usama Fayyad, Yahoo’s chief data officer, is leaving the company.

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Last night, dressed in my kindergarten soccer-coach best (sneaks, sweats and athletic socks–glam!), I ventured over to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to attend VentureBeat’s party in honor of the launch of its new digital media blog.
Held at the Ambassador club on Geary Street, it was as if 1999 had never ended, and the [...]

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Here’s a few video clips of Yahoo’s Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of its Network division, onstage at paidContent’s Economics of Social Media conference on Tuesday.
In the first, he egregiously ignores BoomTown’s subtle (as a hammer!) way of asking about the Microsoft (MSFT) situation.
In the second, Weiner talks about Yahoo’s (YHOO) social-networking strategy (translation: this [...]

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Valleywag got a hold of a sticker (see below) that Bebo employees are passing around in anticipation of the close of the purchase of the third-ranked social-networking site by AOL for $850 million in cash.
The motto: “I, for one, welcome our new AOL overlords.”
Why shouldn’t they? As BoomTown reported, every Bebo employee has had their [...]

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So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?
Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop [...]

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I could not agree more with both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas, an unlikely and motley trio we three, when I say: Leave Sarah Lacy alone.

OK, the interview she did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW on Sunday was a little silly at times and she probably annoyed people [...]

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