Yahoo has hired a new head of mergers and acquisitions–former General Electric M&A exec Andrew Siegel, who will now be VP of corporate development.

Yahoo CFO Tim Morse dropped the news with no details about that title in an interview with The Wall Street Journal about the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s third-quarter earnings.

One question apparently not answered was what exactly is the status of its current top M&A exec, Greg Mrva–who has had the title Siegel now has posted on his LinkedIn profile–as well as that of VP of mergers and acquisitions more recently.

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According to numerous sources, Yahoo has been shopping around Zimbra, the open-source email company it bought in late 2007 for $350 million.

Zimbra is only one of the many assets of Yahoo that are now on the block, including its personals business, its HotJobs online classified unit and more to come.

The effort to unload Zimbra is yet another sign that the company is trying to slim down its diverse portfolio, even as it strives to redefine itself this week with a new, pricey marketing campaign that seeks to position Yahoo primarily as a consumer company.

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Yahoo exec Brad Garlinghouse–famous for his controversial “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” which correctly chided the Internet giant for becoming so lugubrious several years ago–is taking a job at AOL very similar to the one he left at Yahoo last year.

Garlinghouse, who will remain on the West Coast, will be named president of Internet and mobile communications at AOL, putting him in charge of the New York-based Time Warner online unit’s powerful email and instant-messaging properties, including ICQ and AIM.

He will also be, said AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, its “CEO of Silicon Valley for us.”

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Little known factoid: Every time a penny drops onto a start-up, a venture capitalist gets his wings.

Well, OK, not so much, but it’s one way to look at it.

An example of that, though, is this video interview I did with serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj, who has been on the ground floor of a number of tech start-ups, sold one (Zimbra to Yahoo for $350 million in late 2007) and has now made his first investment as a new VC.

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More musical chairs at Yahoo, which BoomTown predicted recently, as top execs at the company move in and out of jobs, and new ones from the outside move in.

Perhaps the most important change to occur is the replacement this week of SVP Scott Dietzen–who had been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo–by former Adobe Systems exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.

And there’s even more…

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Yes, more layoffs are indeed coming to Yahoo, sources confirmed to BoomTown, but perhaps even more than have been reported.

But that’s not all, as even more top-level managers are either leaving or being moved around the ever-changing organizational structure at Yahoo.

That includes a longtime top sales operations exec, Dan Foehner, who is about to start at Facebook next week, as well as others contemplating leaving, on their way out or being reshuffled.

In other words, business as usual at the tumultuous company, whose nickname should be “Reorg.”

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Here’s an interesting irony–Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will have her 99th day in office on the very one that the Internet giant will announce its first-quarter earnings: April 21, 2009 at 2 p.m. PST.

Technically, it will mean that she has been running Yahoo for 100 days, a time when most administrations get their first evaluation.

Thus, if it’s good enough for President Obama, it’s good enough for Bartz!

While most expect the results for the quarter to be weak, due to the econalypse, the overall verdict from BoomTown’s needling of Yahoos to give me info on their new leader recently: Love, love, love Bartz’s innate decisiveness, and wanting more of the same.

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Another former Yahoo exec has landed at a Silicon Valley venture firm. This time, well-regarded serial entrepreneur Satish Dharmaraj will become a partner at Redpoint Ventures, according to sources.

The move of Dharmaraj is interesting, given that he is not starting a new company or taking a post as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm, which many operating execs do after leaving a company.

Sources close to the situation said Dharmaraj would focus on business software, the enterprise arena and infrastructure at Redpoint.

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Jill Nash, Yahoo’s chief communications officer, has told CEO Carol Bartz and other Yahoo staff this afternoon that she is leaving the company.

Nash, sources said, told staff that she does not have any plans to move to another company immediately, so the reasons for her departure are unclear.

BoomTown would have to guess that Nash is simply completely spent from her past two years at Yahoo, which have been very fraught from a public relations perspective, to say the least.

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With Yahoo earnings expected to be dismal when the company reports fourth-quarter earnings this Tuesday afternoon, new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is going to have to hang tough.

And she certainly seems capable of that. At her first all-hands meeting, Bartz said, according to one report others have since confirmed to BoomTown, that she would “drop-kick to f***ing Mars” employees who leak to the press.

That threat sent little shivers up BoomTown’s spine too, which is why it must have taken so long for her first-week missive to Yahoo staff worldwide to get to my inbox.

Well played, Ms. Bartz, well played.

But turnabout is also fair play…

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One of Yahoo’s top marketing execs, Eric Hadley, who came to the company with a lot of acclaim in November, is set to leave for a new job in Microsoft’s MSN online service, several sources said.

Hadley had previously worked at Microsoft, although he had come to Yahoo from the CMO job at Heavy.com. At Yahoo, he was hired as its VP of U.S. field marketing.

It’s yet another sign of renewed executive unrest at Yahoo. Yesterday, BoomTown reported that Zimbra founder Satish Dharmaraj was leaving Yahoo, which was later confirmed by the company.

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Satish Dharmaraj–the founder of open-source email start-up Zimbra, which has been at the heart of significant new changes to Yahoo’s key communications services–will be leaving the company.

Yahoo paid $350 million for Zimbra in the fall of 2007.

And even though he had stepped back from leadership in the communications arena at Yahoo, the departure of an innovative entrepreneur like Dharmaraj–although typical when big companies buy start-ups–is never a good thing, given that it’s more important than ever to keep innovative leaders at Yahoo.

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Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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In its ongoing renovation of its offerings–last month it began rolling out a new homepage–Yahoo is unveiling a new online calendar, with a passel of new bells and whistles, to a small group of users worldwide.

Overall, it is a good-looking, simple and clean design–which will eventually be extended to all of Yahoo’s 8.1 million calendar users worldwide.

And, incredibly, although Yahoo’s is the top online calendar in the world, it has been 10 years since the Internet giant updated it.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 3 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates.

In this video, Melinda Gates talks about the best ways to fix the broken parts of the public high school educational system in the U.S.

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