Jared Cohen (pictured here), who has gained fame as the State Department’s social networking phenom and the youngest member of its policy planning staff, is considering taking a job at Google in a strategic policy role, said sources close to the situation.

Cohen has been in discussions with Google very recently about going there, those sources said, although it is not a done deal.

In other words, the revolving door between Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley keeps on turning, especially Googlers.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, who worked for both Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO), recently left a job at the State Department to return to California to head international efforts for Twitter.

Google’s top policy wonk, Andrew McLaughlin, serves as deputy chief technology officer.

Sonal Shah, who worked at Google.org, is now director of the White House’s new Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation.

And Sumit Agarwal, who was head of Google’s mobile product management, became the deputy assistant secretary of defense for outreach and social media in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Coincidentally, for their Twitter-as-statecraft fame, the 28-year-old Cohen, along with Alec Ross, a senior adviser for innovation at the State Department, got the full New York Times magazine profile treatment earlier this month in a piece titled “Digital Diplomacy.”

Wrote Jesse Lichtenstein:

“Their Twitter posts have become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies and other nonstate actors. Ross and Cohen’s style of engagement–perhaps best described as a cross between social-networking culture and foreign-policy arcana–reflects the hybrid nature of this approach…They are the public face of a cause with an important-sounding name: 21st-century statecraft.”

If it sounds a lot twee in a policy wonk way, it definitely is, which should fit in well at Google, which could use a few friendlier faces to show off in Washington, where some regulators are eyeballing the search giant’s growing power closely.

In the piece, Cohen is seen as playing the organizer of a private dinner Secretary Hillary Clinton had with some Silicon Valley power players, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt, earlier this year.

He and Ross have also been leading technology delegations abroad to places like Iraq, Haiti, Russia and the Congo, chock full of Internet leaders.

Cohen, who attended Stanford University and was also a Rhodes scholar, was actually appointed by the Bush administration’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

He is also the author of a book, “Children of Jihad: A Young American’s Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East.”

Google and Cohen both declined to comment.

But to give you an idea of their close relationship, here is a video of Cohen and Ross in a conversation with Schmidt at the the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., in March:

David Geffen, who had previously tried to buy the Los Angeles Times, has been trying to buy a chunk of the New York Times (NYT). So says Fortune magazine, which says that Geffen offered to buy the stake owned by Harbinger Capital, and so says TheWrap.com and Reuters.

None of the stories cite an on-the-record source. But my assumption is that, in all cases, the authors talked to Geffen, who has been known to chat up a reporter or two, and always with a very specific agenda.

In this case, Geffen–or whoever is talking to Fortune, TheWrap.com and Reuters–wants to make it clear that the billionaire media mogul is willing to buy a 19 percent chunk of the paper for a lot less than Harbinger did in 2007. The investment group paid some $500 million for its stake back then, and it is worth less than $200 million now.

Exactly why Geffen is so interested is unclear since it’s not like buying 19 percent of a run-of-the-mill public company where shareholders have real clout. The Times’s dual-class stock structure means it is, for all intents and purposes, a private company owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family. The only real way to exercise influence over the company would be to lend it a good deal of money–which is exactly what billionaire Carlos Slim did earlier this year.

Also unclear: Why Google (GOOG) would have “looked seriously” at the opportunity to buy the Times in the last few weeks, as Fortune’s Richard Siklos reports in the same story.

The part that sounds right to me is that Harbinger approached co-founder Larry Page about a deal. That’s because Page is the Googler most concerned about the declining state of the newspaper business and has pushed the company to think about ways it could assist the industry.

Presumably that could be through commercial innovations like the new search feature the company is reportedly working on or perhaps even via Google.org, the company’s nonprofit foundation.

But I’m told that while Google execs have brought up the notion of snapping up distressed newspapers using its huge cash hoard within the past year, those talks have never gotten serious. It’s hard to see how they could: Google has emphatically stayed out of the content business so far, and it’s unclear why it would change direction now–and invest in a shrinking industry at the same time.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt himself declared that Google wasn’t in the newspaper-buying business a few months ago, in an interview with… Fortune:

“Fortune: How about just buying [newspapers]?

Schmidt: The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don’t think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question, we’re in this uncomfortable conversation.

I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I’ve been using is ‘merge without merging.’ The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don’t have to do it on exclusive basis.”

That sounds an awful lot like someone who wants to advertise on newspaper sites, not buy them.

On Twitter, the terms “swine flu,” “#swineflu,” “CDC” and “Mexico” were among the top phrases used on the social messaging service on Monday, after the U.S. declared a public health emergency.

Google.org (GOOG) introduced Google Flu Trends at the end of 2008 as a way to keep Internet users informed about flu trends more rapidly than with traditional surveillance from the Centers for Disease Control. And with this recent outbreak, users can also use Google Maps to track the spread of swine flu as cases are reported across the world.

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The founder, Christopher Poole, also known as “moot,” received 16.8 million votes. Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim was a distant runner up, with 2.3 million votes, followed by evangelist Rick Warren with 1.9 million. The rest of the top 10 included Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, Google.org (GOOG) head Larry Brilliant, Attorney General Eric Holder, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, basketball star Kobe Bryant and Bolivian president Evo Morales.

While 4chan is one of the most popular sites for kick-starting viral videos and online trends like Rickrolling, with a self-proclaimed 3 million unique visitors a month, it’s unlikely that Mr. Poole tops the list of influential people in the lives of 16 million Time magazine readers.

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The well-known Technology, Entertainment, Design conference–better known to its techie fans as TED–will make its move from Monterey to Long Beach, in California, starting tomorrow night.

It’s a big change for the longtime gathering of digerati and others who have come to love its eclectic and outward-looking program, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

First held in 1984, Chris Anderson’s Sapling Foundation bought TED in 2001 from its founder, Richard Saul Wurman. TED has since grown to include an international conference, TEDGlobal; media initiatives, including TED Talks and TED.com; and the TED Prize.

TED2009 is titled “The Great Unveiling.” And BoomTown is glad to be attending after several years away, especially since I always learn something new at TED (and I have a lot to learn).

It certainly has a varied lineup of speakers again this year, such as Microsoft (MSFT) Co-Founder Bill Gates, neurological anthropologist Oliver Sacks, writer Elizabeth Gilbert, tree researcher Nalini Nadkarni, Web political phenom Nate Silver and many others.

But I am perhaps even more intrigued by the introduction this year of the TED Fellows program, initially 50 individuals picked because of the “world-changing potential of their work.”

They will be invited to participate in the TED community each year, and some of the fellows will come for longer stints to future conferences.

The fellows program is supported by the Bezos family, the Harnisch Foundation, private donors and Nokia (NOK), with additional in-kind support from Kodak (EK), Lightscribe and One.org.

According to the press release, the fellows program was inspired by TED’s Africa program in 2007:

“The TED Fellows program will focus on attracting applicants living or working in five parts of the globe: the Asia/Pacific region, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East, with consideration given to applicants from the rest of the world….The program focuses on innovators in technology, entertainment, design, science, film, art, music, entrepreneurship and the NGO community, among other pursuits.”

Said Tom Rielly, TED Community Director, who is responsible for the program: “TED will help them communicate their ‘ideas worth spreading’ to a much larger audience.”

Given the troubles all over the world these days, we could all use a much broader perspective.

You can read the longer list of fellows, who seem to deliver just that here, but some of the first participants include:

• Erik Hersman and Juliana Rotich, co-founders of Ushahidi.com, a Web site for citizen journalism, covering crises such as the Kenyan post-election violence

• Faisal Chohan, CEO of Cogilent Solutions and founder of BrightSpyre.com, the leading job portal in Pakistan

• Juliana Machado Ferreira, Brazilian CSI: Wildlife biologist who uses genetic markers to track, interdict and convict illegal songbird traffickers

• Gerry Douglas, founder of Malawi’s Baobab Health Partnership, which builds touchscreen terminals that allow non-doctors to diagnose, treat and correctly prescribe drugs for people with HIV

On Wednesday, an always worthwhile Internet-focused conference, the annual Web 2.0 Summit, kicks off in San Francisco.

The lineup for the three-day event is particularly good this year and it is also a perfect time to take the temperature of the Internet’s movers and shakers, given all the hubbub of late with the weak economy. (BoomTown will thus be there with the trusty–and shaky–Flip video, chronicling it all for future generations.)

Speakers will include bicycle champ Lance Armstrong, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang, former VP Al Gore, Google.org head Larry Brilliant, Paul Otellini of Intel (INTC) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others, chattering away on a wide range of topics. (You can see the full schedule here.)

There’s also, of course, a passel of parties, including one on Thursday night thrown by MySpace Music. And it will–shades of Web 1.0!–feature an exclusive performance by Lionel Richie (and also DJ AM).

I am, I shall admit it and without irony, a closet fan of Richie. And why not, with so much infectious fluff to choose: “Hello,” “Say You, Say Me,” “Three Times a Lady.”

Most importantly, I will be curious to see if there will be “Dancing on the Ceiling” among the beaten-down start-up crowd. (See that music video below and ponder exactly why you know you know each and every word to that funkadelic song.)

Hosted by Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, the Web 2.0 Summit is called “Web Mets World” this year. By that, BoomTown is inferring that its organizers think it is time for the Internet to grow up. But why don’t we let them speak:

The commercial web is now a teenager—it’s been fifteen short years since Marc Andreessen released the Mosaic browser. To put this in perspective, television as a commercial medium reached its fifteenth birthday in 1956—the year Elvis Presley made his first appearance on national TV…as we pondered the theme for this year, one clear signal has emerged: our conversation is no longer just about the Web. Now is the time to ask how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world’s most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.”

And, of course, here’s Lionel:

Velcroed together, stacked in racks, and lined up in back-to-back rows, the servers require a half-watt in cooling for every watt they use in processing, and Google leads the field in squeezing more servers into less space. Based on projected industry standard of 500 watts per square foot in 2011, the Dalles plant can be expected to demand about 103 megawatts of electricity–enough to power 82,000 homes, or a city the size of Tacoma, Washington.”

– Keyword: Evil, Harper’s Magazine, March 2008

You can make money without doing evil. You can also make it without using so much fossil fuel. That’s the word from Google, which today unveiled a $4.4 trillion plan it says will reduce the nation’s dependence on coal and oil.

Google’s “Clean Energy 2030” plan as its described by Jeffery Greenblatt, Google.org’s climate and energy-technology manager, proposes to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity generation by 2030 by relying on power from wind, nuclear and geothermal sources instead. It also calls for raising the standard car fuel efficiency from 31 mpg to 45 mpg and increasing usage of plug-in hybrids and pure electric cars.

It’s an ambitious plan, to say the least. Expensive too–a jaw-dropping $4.4 trillion dollars. But Google (GOOG) believes it could generate net savings of $1 trillion over its 22-year span. It might even save our children’s grandchildren from a world in which they rove post-apocalyptic desert wastelands scavenging for food and gasoline, terrorized by marauding biker gangs. And who could place a monetary value on that, eh?

“We see a huge opportunity for the nation to confront our energy challenges,” Greenblatt explained. “In the process we will stimulate investment, create jobs, empower consumers and, by the way, help address climate change.”

And lest we think Google is hiding its own self interest (Read: Lower data center electric bills) behind a $4.4 trillion dollar mask of altruism, consider this remark from Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spoke at an event in San Francisco Wednesday evening: “We’re going to likely consume more energy,” he said. “We’d like the prices to go down … We save a lot of money when prices go down. It’s good for shareholders, good for earnings.”

And in the end, what’s wrong with approaching clean energy from a capitalist position? We certainly approach dirty energy in that way.

This morning the company launched its first significant philanthropic initiative–an $11 million effort to speed development of the plug-in hybrid electric car. Dubbed RechargeIT, the project is essentially a test bed for vehicle-to-grid technology that will enable hybrids to run partly on electricity from the power grid and also to give electricity back to the power company.

“Linking the U.S. transportation system to the electricity grid maximizes the efficiency of our energy system,” Dan Reicher, director of Climate and Energy Initiatives for Google.org, wrote on the organization’s Web site. “Our goal is to demonstrate the plug-in hybrid and V2G technology, get people excited about having their own plug-in hybrid, and encourage car companies to start building them soon.”

RechargeIT is launching with six power-saving Google cars, but eventually plans to have 100 that can be used as part of a car-sharing program. That’s enough cars to start a small dealership, but Reicher is quick to note that the program is a science project and not one of Google’s varied new business initiatives. “Google is not going to get into the business of building and selling hybrid electrics,” Reicher said. “Our focus is on accelerating their developing through research, testing and investment.”