The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly......

Locally, the big news was the second best blog party last Friday thrown by TechCrunch down in Menlo Park. Scott Beale was commissioned to take the photos, including the one above featuring an uneasy handshake between Valleywag's Nick Douglas (left) and his favorite whipping boy, TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Nick had been bumped off the exclusive invite list, but Michel must have relented. If he had been dis-invited, apparently crashing the party was not an......

Dan Gillmor bows out of Bayosphere in Businessweek -- reactions from JD Lasica, Jonas Luster and Thomas Hawk. Blogger Tom Foremski says he's doing just fine, claiming to be more popular with PR folks than the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg. Hey, at least no one has had to resort to astroblogging (astroturfing + blogging, natch). John Paczkowski is afraid, very afraid about rumors that boo.com is back. "Best Headline in a While" award......

Tom Foremski defends his opinion that bloggers, and not Bono, Bill and Melinda, should have gotten Time's recent Person of the Year cover. Om Malik realizes that GigaOm's content is being ripped-off, and wonders what he can do about it -- we see this kind of crap all the time, and hope that there's an especially hot place in the afterlife for the perpetrators. Eric Rice gives a video camera to a five year......

In media news, looks like Google got caught with their Craigslist-killer pants down over the weekend when their new database system was accidentally revealed to the public. Their shiny, baggy, flowing pants. Tom Foremski talks to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster about all things classified ad. These are probably some of the things talked about a recent Scoble and Winer 'geek dinner' in Berkeley that Scott Beale snapped some pics of. But the buzz around......