En route to BlogHer's San Francisco conference this weekend, which has blossomed from 300 to 3,000 attendees in four years, four mommy bloggers geared up with sponsored cars and EVDO wireless broadband are documenting their pilgrimage. For a conference and a community with a nigh-religious following, many are eagerly embracing their own monetization as a form of proving their girl-powered devotion. Sisterhood, meet syndication. (Photo by Sarah606)

Yahoo has admitted defeat, under the guise of openness. The company will start letting Google sell ads on Yahoo search results, generating as much as $800 million a year for Yahoo; the increase comes from Google's superior efficiency at matching ads to search queries and milking money from advertisers. Intriguingly, the reason Yahoo gave for ending talks with Microsoft was that Web search was integral to its business. Search may be, but not the ads that run alongside search?

The inconsistency seems foolish. Yahoo plans to "blend" Google ads with its search results, as well as its own search ads — suggesting it will keep its Panama search-advertising platform alive, for now. Yet outsourcing the bulk of its ads to Google, as Yahoo must do to realize its hoped-for revenues, will starve Panama of the volume of data it needs to continuously refine its ad-placement algorithms. One wonders if this has anything to do with Usama Fayyad's departure. As Yahoo's chief data officer, he must have understood better than everyone the devil's bargain Yahoo made in this Google pact.

(Illustration by dannysullivan)

But Google only wants to give Yahoo so many options as long as there's even a remote possibility Microsoft will try to acquire the company. As soon as that threat's gone, expect word of "divided" Google executives worried about antitrust regulations to return — leaving Yahoo shareholders without a Google deal or a Microsoft deal. Just Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang's infinite wisdom.

Andreessen's conclusion is worth quoting in full:

We are learning that hostile takeovers have arrived in our industry. This is the second major hostile takeover so far — the other was Oracle's takeover of Peoplesoft — but there will be more.

This is significant because historically hostile takeovers practically never happened in technology. Potential hostile acquirors assumed that hostile takeovers wouldn't work because the target company's employees would bail and the target company's business would collapse.

It turns out that as technology companies become larger and more mature, acquirors are becoming increasingly convinced that neither of these assumptions hold. Perhaps employees of large tech companies aren't that bonded to current management, and perhaps many of them would actually prefer to work for a larger, more dominant combined company. And maybe as a consequence, the target's business would do just fine in the wake of a hostile takeover — in fact, maybe it would do better, due to advantages of combined size and scale.

My bet is that hostile takeovers, particularly of larger and more mature companies, are going to become increasingly common in our industry.

The excitement may be just beginning.

What has changed in the near-decade since then? Yahoo, which grew up alongside Netscape — at one point, Netscape hosted Yahoo's servers — is that much farther from being a startup. Working there offers less risk, and less reward. Andreessen doesn't come out and say it, but he strongly suggests the place has become infested with careerists who would be just as happy working at Microsoft.

After the Netscape acquisition, Andreessen worked briefly and unhappily as AOL's CTO. For Yahoos, wheeling and dealing may be fine; but for him, it's the startup life or nothing. Andreessen may feign nonchalance at the prospect of more hostile takeovers in tech. But that doesn't mean he personally wants any part in them.

The gambit is simple: Most searches are profitless. Only a small number generate any revenue, and a smaller percentage accounts for most of the money Google, Yahoo, and other search engines make when users look up phrases.

Google could take over a very small number of searches, percentage-wise, and yet boost most of Yahoo's search revenues. How could the feds object to a deal which only involves, say, 10 percent of Yahoo's searches?

The trick for Microsoft is to make the argument about money, not traffic. That will be difficult, since Google can change the topic from search ads, where it dominates, to display ads, where it trails behind AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Google played games with market-share definitions well enough to buy DoubleClick, despite a ferocious lobbying campaign by Microsoft. Opposing a commercial deal, not an acquisition, will be even harder for Microsoft. A Google-Yahoo deal could happen — and if it does, it will be by the numbers.

Slide won't be running an IPO any time soon. The only way founder Max Levchin and Fidelity and T. Rowe Price cash out is by being acquired, perhaps for a hefty chunk of Facebook stock. Mark Zuckerberg's company already has a huge amount of eyeballs, but picking up Slide would give them even more — and most importantly, massive reach across the other social networks that Slide's widgets run on.

Zuckerberg has already said he wants to expand Facebook across the Web, looking ahead to the inevitable day when growth on his site stagnates, the way it already has on rival MySpace. Beacon, his first attempt to extend Facebook, flopped last year amid charges that the privacy-invading feature ruined some users' Christmases.

An ad network for widgets could be Facebook's answer to Google AdSense. Google makes a ton of money from ads placed on Google.com, but reaches thousands more sites by offering them a cut of ads it sells and places. It also helps track users as they move around the Web.

Combining Facebook's existing ad ventures with Slide's huge audience of drunken-party-pic posters would give Zuck a hedge against fickle users abandoning his site for the next new thing. As Google showed us, the advertising business is where the money is made. It would be smart for Zuckerberg to solidify his hold on the market while he still can. Of course, he'd have to buy Slide for inflated stock, not cash — but Web entrepreneurs like Levchin love to deflect reporters' questions about their wealth by saying it's all on paper.

As Silicon Alley Insider points out, both parties have much to lose. Cramer still owns 14 percent of the company, a stake worth around $42 million. CNBC, where Cramer yells a lot on air, has less of a Web audience than TheStreet.com. And try this pop quiz: Name someone who writes for TheStreet.com besides Cramer.

In the U.S., 7/Eleven is one of many convenience-store chains. In Japan, it's an iconic retailing powerhouse — and it has owned 7-Eleven in the U.S. for 18 years.

Another model: The Seagate-Veritas deal. Seagate, a hard-drive maker, owned a large chunk of Veritas, a storage-software company it had spun off. In a $20 billion deal, Silver Lake took Seagate private, swapping out Seagate shares for Veritas shares. Similarly, Yahoo Japan could unlock its shares held by Yahoo by swapping them for a large equity stake. Complicated, but not inconceivable, especially if private equity injects some cash — and money managers might be keener on a direct stake in Yahoo Japan than in the U.S. operation.

The key to such a deal would be Softbank, which owns 41 percent of Yahoo Japan. Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son has close ties to both Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who sits on the board of Yahoo Japan.

Softbank also owns 3.9 percent of Yahoo, but it also owns, as does Yahoo, a large stake in Alibaba, the operator of Yahoo China. Alibaba's management is reportedly restive about the prospect of Microsoft getting a say in their affairs. Softbank might throw its Alibaba stake into the combination, which would give Alibaba an exit in the public markets without the risk of an IPO, and the new Yahoo majority control of its Chinese websites.

Making the numbers work, especially when Microsoft could easily raise its bid, is a challenge. In some ways, selling out to Yahoo Japan would be as humbling to Yahoo's management as selling to Microsoft. But while Tokyo is more distant than Redmond, I suspect the cultures are more compatible.

The fundamental logic of Microsoft's bid is that it can do more with the Yahoo brand than Yahoo itself can. Many doubt Microsoft will actually manage that. Yahoo Japan has proven it can.

One could go into a longwinded dissertation on how rumors like this spread, how word leaks in the midst of negotiations, and how the press gets inadvertently roped into fraught negotiations. But I prefer one peer's much simpler explanation: "Brad Greenspan is crazy."

Plaxo already supplies Comcast with address-book functions for its Internet subscribers. But Comcast wants to sell packages of video, Internet access, and phone service, including wireless. To really hook customers, it wants to synchronize those services — so, for example, you might get a caller ID notice on your TV, with the name matched from your email address book, and reply with a text message. Too bad Plaxo's Pulse, the project Smarr has devoted so much time to, doesn't play much of a role in that scenario.

(Numbers by Thomson Financial)

Yahoo's board must come up with a deal that makes Yahoo at least as valuable as Microsoft's bid. How does Murdoch get to $45 billion? By injecting $15 billion in capital into the company. That could come in the form of MySpace and the rest of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media division, valued at roughly $6 billion, and $9 billion in cash from News Corp. and perhaps some private-equity funds. They'd exchange that for $15 billion in freshly issued Yahoo shares. Yahoo's existing shareholders would own three-quarters of a $60 billion company, while News Corp. would own a quarter. Presto, instant value! As a bonus, News Corp. would become a large shareholder in Yahoo, capable of blocking another advance from Microsoft.

Murdoch is proud of having spent only $580 million for MySpace. Buying into Yahoo at such a dear price might not appeal. But if he can play with other people's money, and tweak Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer in the process, he might just do it.

The cable giant has been an active buyer of startups recently, and Plaxo already runs its online address book. Whoever buys Plaxo is likely to be after its engineers and its Pulse social network, not its legacy address-synching business. That's what we hear drew Facebook's interest. But Facebook has, as far as we can tell, dropped out of the bidding for Plaxo.

Facebook's cash is reserved for a massive datacenter expansion. And a stock deal would bring Sequoia Capital into Facebook as an investor. We hear Sequoia is keen on that prospect. Facebook's investors — a group which includes Plaxo founder Sean Parker, whom Sequoia forced out of the company — are not as sanguine about such a scenario.

Plaxo and Google are working closely on its OpenSocial platform, and Smarr incorporated Fitzpatrick's recently developed friend-finding tool hours after its launch. Would Google spend a nine-digit sum to keep an engineer happy? Sure. It's pocket change for the search giant. An acquisition would also keep Smarr and the technology he's developed out of Mark Zuckerberg's hands at Facebook. And to think, I didn't even need to map a social graph to figure that out. (Photo by silverisdead)

Bebo is small, but there aren't a lot of options left for companies looking to pick up a social network. Bebo is big in the United Kingdom, a large market sometimes forgotten in the Valley. Google's existing social network, Orkut, is big in Brazil and India, and that's it. Buying Bebo would also keep it away from MySpace — with Rupert Murdoch dropping by and Bebo looking for additional investment, anything is possible. Update: Kara Swisher says Bebo's hoping to get a $1 billion valuation in a round of financing, with Google or News Corp. as potential investors, not candidates to buy the whole company.

The diminished financing must be a disappointment to Arora. But it also could be a comedown for the crowded ranks of investment bankers working the deal: Allen & Co., Bank of America, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank are all involved, we hear. Split four ways, the commission on the shrunken deal likely won't pay many bonuses. (Note: Glam represents some sites which compete with Jezebel, a women's blog published, like Valleywag, by Gawker Media.)

The company has an extensive back-end sales and distribution network, buying and selling closeout goods to other companies in the industry, including finding items for Amazon to sell on its Gold Box promotion site. It's expanding into T-shirts and wine, as well. Its fulfillment operations are large and sophisticated enough to qualify for FedEx and USPS's SmartPost service (though plenty of users have complained about missed SmartPost deliveries, so that's nothing to brag about). Perhaps the most astounding tidbit of information we got? Woot gets 250,000 views in the first three minutes after midnight from consumers looking to grab the next new item for sale.

The deal does offer a generous 25 percent premium to eBay shareholders, pricing the company's shares at the 52-week-high they briefly touched in October. But as proposed, it would be ruinously dilutive to Yahoo shareholders, leaving them with 36 percent of the combined company. Why a Yahoo shareholder would settle for this escapes me, however, unless they have completely written off Yahoo's management, brand, and assets.

Which is not out of the question. At the levels Yahoo's trading at, shareholders are essentially paying for its minority stakes in Yahoo Japan, Alibaba in China, and Gmarket in Korea. But if a shareholder would be disillusioned enough to accept this deal, one wonders why they wouldn't simply sell their Yahoo shares and buy eBay shares on the open market, where they're considerably cheaper.

I don't know if this plan is being seriously considered within Yahoo. As many have written, Yahoo and eBay's assets make a nice strategic fit, in theory; eBay's PayPal already has a search-ads partnership with Yahoo, and the two companies have other advertising deals. Google is actively pursuing a profitable combination of search and e-commerce through its Checkout initiative, sharpening the threat to both Yahoo and eBay. Not to mention Skype, which eBay has written off but could find a better fit with Yahoo's mail and IM products.

But in practice? The reality is that both companies are collections of underused assets, with management that has allowed vital talent to flee. Putting them together might provide a needed shakeout of eBay and Yahoo's overstaffed executive suites, but the transition would be chaotic and painful.

A much simpler course would be selling out to Microsoft or News Corp., which surely remain interested in Yahoo's online-advertising business, if they can stomach all the troubles that come with it.

That this rumor is circulating, that it's even being whispered about, suggests that Jerry Yang may have given up on being rescued by a deep-pocketed buyer. Issuing so much undervalued paper for eBay smacks of desperation. It would keep Yahoo independent, but at a very steep price. So steep that, if it's being seriously considered, can only mean no one wants to buy Yahoo.

The only serious potential buyers are RealNetworks, though they may have fallen out of buyout talks already, and Napster, which continues to perform poorly and just recently began to shift its strategy away from subscriptions, too. Getting out of the subscription business is probably a necessary move for Yahoo, but the company may just have to settle for mothballing the operation. Good riddance.