Wilkinson himself only considers the Googleplex redesign “partially successful.” The Times reports:

Many engineers and the company’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, were not happy with the shock of change, including orange and green carpets, glass workrooms with yurt-like tented fabric roofs to absorb reverberations and “clubhouses” with beanbag chairs for brainstorming that some employees just avoid. “The acoustics in the yurts made people woozy,” said a Google executive who asked to remain anonymous to protect his job. While neither Google nor Mr. Schmidt would comment, Mr. Schmidt, by many accounts, moved out of the building and his large glass office into a tiny but secluded space. “Tour groups and passersby were always rapping on his glass wall to say hi,” said the Google executive. “Eric felt it was unproductive.”

We are in the process of talking to the government. They've not indicated one way or the other how they're dealing with us. We always worry a little bit, but we think our arguments are pretty strong. Yahoo has made it very, very clear they're going to take the best parts of their network and ours and combine them.'

(Photo by World Economic Forum)

The poster claims Dickman then arranged to get a kickback from Bon Appétit. Google, he goes on to write, investigated Dickman and Bon Appétit, going as far as testing fruits and vegetables, presumably to see if they met Google's high standards for organic and sustainable ingredients. The implication there: Bon Appétit had been feeding Googlers slop dressed up as fancy fare. The end of the Craigslist poster's story: Dickman was brought before Google's board and fired. All juicy gossip — but there's one thing that doesn't make sense about this whole tale.

Dickman is now working at Apple, a company with close ties to Google. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board of directors. Apple directors Bill Campbell and Al Gore are important advisors to Schmidt. If Dickman left Google in a cloud, how could he possibly land a job at Apple? Either the poster's allegations aren't true — or something darker is going on here. One possible explanation: Google's leaders might have arranged for Dickman to get a job with their friends at Apple in exchange for buying his silence on other matters.

Here are excerpts from the original post on Craigslist:

Disclaimer: I don't work at Google. I probably never will. I'm not smart enough. As far as I can tell, almost nobody is. So it goes.

From a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, comes the following strange story ...

It seems that once upon a time, there was a guy - we'll call him Dick.

'Dick' was director of food services for a really big dot-com.

'Dick' had a wife. She was a highly placed executive at Bon Appetit....

It's not clear exactly HOW Bon Appetit came to acquire the Go^H^H big dot-com's contract. Right there, some thorny questions can be asked ... like, whether inside information influenced Bon Appetit's bid? ...

It seems that 'Dick' negotiated, it is alleged, two deals - the second deal translated into a end-of-the-year 'rebate' check being cut by B. A. and delivered to, yes, you guessed it, 'Dick'.

To make matters worse B. A., it has been said, did not deliver what they contracted to deliver, to big dot-com's cafeteria(s). Apparently there was a little watering down of quality, a little substitution here and there going on.

Big dot-com, it is said, did an audit. What sort of audit? It seems likely that there were private investigators involved ... I'd surmise a few bugs, here and there ... and maybe some chemical and DNA profiling of fruits and vegetables.

(If 'Dick' was like every other 'dick' I've ever known, he lined up every week to have his car detailed by the inhouse auto detailing service - so installing a bug in his car, as well as retrieving the audio, would have been child's play. Note to would-be 'dicks' ... don't be a dick.)

'Dick' was invited to a meeting of the BoD, I hear, and given two choices - resign, or be terminated. He's outta there, now....

The foundation's two main programs are the 11th Hour Project, an organization which publishes links to information it deems "scientific" about global warming, and Greenhound LLC, a bus operator on Nantucket Island. Schmidt is the founder of the 11th Hour Project, and a longtime summer resident of Nantucket, where she is also an investor in downtown real estate.

Both superficially good causes. But if Eric wanted to give Wendy, who has a master's in journalism from Berkeley, a job writing environmental press releases, why didn't he just hire her at Google, as he did with ex-girlfriend Marcy Simon? And if the Schmidts want to boost the value of their Nantucket real estate with bus service, why don't they just pay for it themselves, rather than with the help of a tax-exempt charitable foundation?

Eric Schmidt complains about the lack of investigative journalism today. This seems like a good place to start. Compared to Bill and Melinda Gates, whose charity reaches around the globe, the Schmidts don't just come across as small-hearted. They look downright unimaginative.

The press release also quotes Google's Internet evangelist Vint Cerf declaring, "there isn't any privacy, get over it," though from the context of the cited article, it seems he was jokingly parroting former Sun Microsystems CEO Scot McNealy from 1999.Any commenters care to name the executive who lives in the walled compound pictured here? If you're worried Eric Schmidt will blackball you, feel free to send us a tip instead. Update: Of course, it's Larry Page's house (which Valleywag had earlier revealed). And the NLPC didn't do a great job of obfuscating the address — opening the PDF in Illustrator or Acrobat Pro makes it easy to remove the redactions.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

1:36 — The canned music is off and we're starting with the disclaimers. 11-word version: Our lawyers say you can't hold us to anything we say.

1:38 — Schmidt's taken the line now. He's already talking about how well Google's doing in "uncertain" times. Which shouldn't be very impressive, because didn't these guys used to say the economy would have no effect on Google? Yes, they did.

1:41 — Schmidt is going on about Google's impressive international growth.

1:41 — Now Schmidt's talking about Google CFO Patrick Pichette. He's also going on about how much he'll miss former CFO George Reyes. What, that idiot?

1:44 — European growth was strong largely on automotive advertising growth, Reyes tells us.

1:44 — Reyes warns that traffic acquisitions costs are probably going to go up.

1:45 — 448 new employees came on, mostly in engineering, sales and marketing. Oh yeah, and a whole bunch of DoubleClickers. (Though not as many as there could have been).

1:46 — Operating cash remains strong at $1.77 billion. If you're curious. (In which case, you'd be better off looking at Google's press release.)

1:48 — Now we're listening to Google's chief economist, Hal Varian. He says that Google queries are strong, even in places where you'd expect them to be down — such as auto and home sales. Year over year auto ad spending is actually up, for example.

1:49 — Consumers are being cautious in their online spending. Advertising remains strong, however.

1:50 — Brin picks up the phone.

1:50 — He's telling us that Google's search index is much bigger now. Over 100 search quality improvements went through this quarter. "Roughly one a day." For example, now you can get blog results on the bottom of the search page.

1:52 — Brin says: "Many of you may use iGoogle, and we know that because we've seen such tremendous growth."

1:53 — Brin goes on: "If you're listening to me right now, you probably speak English. But if you're using Google translator to read this, you might not. Google translate now covers over 20 languages." Can you imagine taking a meeting with this guy?

1:55 — Brin says this without irony: "Most of you have probably had the chance to watch some YouTube videos by now."

1:56 — Now he's talking about mobile search.

1:57 — "One of the things I'm most excited to tell you about today is our progress with Apps. There are now more than a half million business using Apps. And that's just a tremendous number." Did you know that the government of Washington, D.C. uses Google Apps? That's 38,000 employees! "It's been a very exciting quarter for that." Indeed sir.

1:58 — What I love about Bring are his seques. Like this one: "We don't view Google Apps as a closed environment, by the way. We want to see more companies deploying cloud solutions. One of the things we've done to help that is the Google Appe engine."

2:00 — Now Brin's talking about the very successful app: Buddy Poking. "For those of you that like to poke." Proudly hosted on Google's App engine and available through Open Social.

2:01 — We're moving on to questions and answers.

2:01 — JP Morgan asks: UK growth seems to have decelerated. Why? Also: Will mobile search expand volume? What's the revenue impact going to be?

2:02 — UK deceleration is just typical seasonality — you'll see more of this now that we own most of the market share over there.

2:03 — Sergey answers the mobile question: "I think you'll see an uptick in volume because you always want to know something, but you aren't always on your computer to find it out."

2:05 — You've been lowering amount of ads served to increase quality. Will this lowering stop anytime soon?

2:05 — I don't see the focus on quality changing. We would just show one ad — the perfect ad — if we could.

2:08 — Goldman Sachs: If queries are down in a sector, do advertisers respond by bidding up to reach a smaller set of consumers?

2:09 — Hal Varian's answer: Sometimes, yes. When there's a scarcity of searchers, the cost to reach them sometimes increases.

2:10 — Schmidt: Culturally, YouTube is a far greater success than we ever-expected. On the revenue side, I personally do not believe the best ad product has been invented yet.

2:11 — With YouTube we're access advertisers like Footlocker, LionsGate, Lenovo

2:13 — How much did DoubleClick contribute to the quarter? How is Google changing the buying process in display?

2:13 — Schmidt: We're not going to break out DoubleClick numbers. The strategy is to develop a broad product line — for the large and small advertisers and publishers. Google: We're piecing together a highly fragmented market (and in the process killing all premiums everywhere! Yay!)

2:18 — Question about headcount. Schmidt responds: What you'll see going forward is prudent management of headcount growth. We're paying a lot of attention. We never want to misuse some of these talented employees.

2:20 — Question about YouTube. Schmidt: We're having a great deal of success with overlays. We're also having success with gadget ads. "When we find the holy grail, it's likely to very large due to the size and scale of YouTube," Schmidt says. Which plays right into Mark Cuban's claim that "YouTube has become the poster child for the old saying "we are losing money on every sale, but we will make it up in volume."

2:20 — A fifth all searches utilize some element of Universal Search. Yeah. The questions are getting boring.
2:34 — I just spared you about 14 minutes of blah. Grateful? We're done here.

"Another important factor that nobody talks about is teachers' salaries," Brin said. "Teachers are among the lowest-paid professionals. At Google, we've been paying our teachers 25 per cent more, but even with that, they're among the lowest-paid employees. I think it's really important to have a living wage for teachers."

Schools, of course, cost money. Google doesn't actually run a school, so Brin must be talking about the workers at his company's wildly overpriced childcare centers. On the Google model, even with teachers at the bottom rung on the payroll ladder, Brin's answer was to demand more money from parents.

Yet I haven't exactly seen Brin standing in solidarity with the teacher unions in California when they've lobbied for salary increases and smaller class sizes. Nor has Brin come out against Prop 13, the bill which froze property taxes in California, permanently hobbling education spending. But then it's been typical of Google to think they can have their gourmet, organic, locally-sourced cake and eat it, too.(Photo by AP/Douglas C. Pizac)

Relative to social network rival Facebook, MySpace's popularity is fading, and its not hard to see why. The site is a design nightmare — not just in a fussy aesthetic sense, but in lacking a basic ability to go from page to page and perform functions — and it has a history of antagonism toward third-party widgetmakers who could improve its features. More importantly, MySpace has disappointed financially. Sure, News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch and company successfully pawned off its search-ads business to Google for $900 million in 2006, butGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt always jumps at the chance to tell reporters exactly how awful that deal has been for Google so far.

Limited Brands CEO Leslie Wexner, for example, spent much of his $1.25 million 2007 security allowance toward "protecting" his corporate aircraft, yacht and 22,371-sq. ft. home. "Security has become a convenient excuse for getting shareholders to pick up the cost for the CEO's lifestyle,' corporate watchdog American Federation of State's director of corporate governance and pension investment told the Wall Street Journal. (Illustration by Richard Blakeley)

Her favorite quotes:

Jesse: I feel bad for all the homeless people
Katharine: I know, they should all go to shelters
Jesse: But I think these are the homeless people who refuse to go to the shelters.
Katharine: Well then why don't we use them for genetic testing!

A longer trailer for her new show:

An interview about her show:

Her prior claim to fame, appearing on Nickelodeon's "The Naked Brothers Band" as Jesse Cook:

Jesse also does comedy. Sort of.

"Don't be evil" is misunderstood. We don't have an evil meter ... the rule allows for conversation. I thought when I joined the company this was crap...it must be a joke. I was sitting in a room in first six months ...talking about some advertising...and someone said that it is evil. It stopped the product. It's a cultural rule, a way of forcing the conversation especially in areas that are ambiguous.

In 2006, Schmidt actually talked about an "evil scale". But now? Nothing even that hard and fast. See, it's not a rule like "no blade scooters in the hallways." It's more of a guideline. Or a punchline.

1. Given the growing reliance on online activism by civic organizations, how will Google ensure that it does not abuse the near 90% share of the search market it will most certainly control if it aligns with Yahoo!, which could allow the company to control how Americans access information on key issues?

2. Google has in the past been accused of using its search algorithms to favor certain search results over others. Such accusations are of particular concern to Hispanic-owned small businesses that rely on Internet search for a competitive equalizer in a marketplace dominated by large corporations. How will a company with 90% control of the search market allay fears that small businesses will lose this valuable economic resource?

3. Privacy advocates such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center and consumer groups like US PIRG have raised serious concerns about Google's privacy policies and practices - concerns that are doubled by the proposed deal that would give Google near-total control of the online search market. For Latinos considering subscribing to broadband services, worries about privacy - along with child safety and content filtering - are determining factors. How quickly will Google move to address these concerns?

4. During review of its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google pledged to alter several of its information-gathering techniques to address privacy concerns, including its use of "cookies" to track users' surfing habits. And yet the company has opposed an array of privacy regulations ranging from state laws in New York and elsewhere to adoption of FTC self-regulatory principles. Is Google now backing away from the pledges it made to usher along the approval of the DoubleClick deal, and will it take a similar tack when attempting to gain antitrust approval for the Yahoo! pact?

5. Cyberlaw scholars have noted that Google's disclosure of its privacy policy, which is not easily accessible from the company's home page, may be in violation of California state law. For Hispanic Internet users - the fastest-growing online population in the country - it is critical that privacy policies and other terms of use are readily disclosed, particularly to users who are new to the Internet. How will Google ensure that its disclosures comply with basic common-sense consumer protection principles?

What ought to stop this search-engine sprawl: Googlers' own consciences, if they are still guided by the "Don't be evil" slogan. Developing new offices on the very fringe of Bay Area's suburbs, on areas that used to be wetlands, or neighbor the fragile ecosystems, is unconscionable. Despite the perk of free shuttle buses, most Googlers still drive carbon-emitting cars to work.

The Bay Area's infrastructure allowed Google to blossom. The region has asked far too little of it in return. Google should commit now to funding the extension of Santa Clara County's light-rail system through its new campus and its old one. It should also expand in cities like San Francisco, already served by public transit, rather than shuttle its workers 40 miles each way. Eliminating energy expended in transportation is far more productive than finding clever ways to achieve marginal efficiencies.

The environmental impact is one thing. But the business impact is another. Google's executives should also ask themselves: What kind of company do they want to be? Do they want to remain cloistered from the world, or engaged in it? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to place his company in downtown Palo Alto, with all the difficulties that poses; his choice meant that his workers rub shoulders daily with Stanford students, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists — and, shockingly, people not involved in the tech industry. On the Googleplex, Googlers live in a world of sameness, with people who never challenge their technology-über-alles worldview.

Larry and Sergey have built themselves a candy-colored bubble on the outskirts of Mountain View. By inflating it, as they've chosen to do, they only increase the risk that a competitor more in touch with the real world will pop it.

Schrage, we hear, strongly opposed Simon's hiring as a consultant for the launch of the then-secret Googlephone — the collection of wireless software now known as Android. And Schmidt's extramarital relationships, first with Simon and later with Kate Bohner, were a source of friction between him and Schrage, not because Schrage disapproved, but because it hurt the company's image. Or so I've heard. I've run into Schrage twice at the conference, and he's made noises about talking to me, at which point I'll ask him directly about all this.

That's not the only run-in Schrage and Simon have had, though. Before taking her current gig at Thomson Reuters — one that Thomson Reuters PR staff are not very happy about — Simon made a strong play to take over PR at Facebook. She was not very gently rebuffed, and Schrage landed the job instead.

And yet here we see Schrage, smiling, or faking a smile, as he catches up on email as Simon and Wojcicki catch up. His new bosses at Facebook should be pleased they've hired someone so skilled at putting on appearances.

We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you'll buy a washing machine. It is not a long term problem but it is taking us longer than we thought.

Security may prevent me from attending the formal program. But the hotel bar is lovely, I hear, and I intend to camp out there, to overhear what I may and hold court with brave (or incautious) tipsters. Folks I'm looking forward to running into:

• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who threatened to shoot me
• Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, or rather, his rumored chaperone at the event — Marcy Simon, Google CEO Eric Schmidt's ex-girlfriend
• Yahoo president Sue Decker, who is negotiating a divorce at the same time as a merger

And that's just for starters. See why I don't get invited to these things?

For you, gentle reader, I can endure a few awkward conversations and more. Peruse the list of speakers, think of questions you'd like me to ask, and I'll do my best to buttonhole them for you.

advertisers can't use Buzz Targeting to serve ads against popular videos uploaded by regular YouTube users, only those uploaded by "content partners" — probably because regular users often don't own the copyright to the videos they upload and it's hard for Google's lawyers to justify YouTube making money off those.

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.

It's not the fact that the married Schmidt sleeps around that bothers Schrage (and most of his underlings in Google PR); it's how Schmidt mixes business and pleasure. His recent mistress, Marcy Simon, was temporarily installed in Google's New York office to head up PR for Google's still-nonexistent Googlephone. Simon's replacement, TV journalist Kate Bohner, has squired Schmidt, very publicly, to at least one political debate cosponsored by Google's YouTube and CNN. If Schrage wanted to deal with bimbo eruptions, he could have stayed in politics.

It's not clear Schrage is the best choice for the Facebook job, objectively speaking. One person who's worked with him says he's a disaster as a manager, and not particularly strong in the PR part of his duties, preferring the more high-falutin' policy work.

But that could make him the perfect yes-man to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans for world amelioration. At the South by Southwest conference, Zuckerberg talked, tongue not at all in cheek, about how Facebook could bring peace to the Middle East by preventing Arab teenages from turning into terrorists. He seems to believe sincerely in this stuff. And if it gets him a job at Facebook, Schrage is just slick enough to put on the illustion that he does, too.

As it stands, a producer can contract with a liquor distributor to produce a commercial at a profit, and then distribute the commercial on YouTube without paying a dime — even reaching underage audiences. Or he can get paid to place brands in the hands of sketch-comedy players. Again, he makes the money, not YouTube. I'm not sure that "innovation" is required so much as doing what television has been doing for generations, which is charging advertisers to distribute their commercial content.

YouTube's incredible rate of user adoption and massive market share has been largely due to the fact that it's reached a critical mass of content, which is better than any advertising the site could have bought. There is no video search anymore, really, just YouTube. What the company needs to do now isn't brainstorm new and interesting ways to sell ads against free content, but leverage what other distribution platforms are already doing — including Google search.

Because even if the site doesn't want to charge Smirnoff to distribute the company's commercials, YouTube could at least charge to have Smirnoff ads appear on searches for specific keywords. And if the online video site policed for copyrighted material, not only would it help make nice with content providers, it would also mean YouTube could then charge them for the distribution of show clips as well — which, ultimately, serve as advertisements for the shows, both on television and online.

As NewTeeVee's Liz Gannes pointed out, "It's all smoke and mirrors until the products launch." I have a bad feeling that YouTube is thinking that "plinking" — embedding product links within videos — and other failed interactive ad schemes of the past will save them. If Google simply put the screws to the people who can pay to play their content, in the time-honored tradition of entertainment distribution racketeers throughout history, the site would have been profitable a long time ago.

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that some of the government's concern focused on a telephone call from Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt to Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang to offer help in thwarting Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid.