With so many more ex-Yahoos out there now that the most recent layoffs have taken place, BoomTown put out feelers to a range of them to ask whom they would like to run the company they no longer work for.

After all, who better than to pick a new CEO than an ex?

The response I got was swift and varied wildly, depending on which way the ex-Yahoo felt the company should go, including quite a few who thought Yahoo needed to sell itself off completely.

Some considered Yahoo (YHOO) a media and advertising company, for example, while others thought of it as a more Web tools outfit. Still, others considered it a turnaround situation, requiring a wholly different kind of CEO.

Perhaps therein lies the problem–it is still hard to define precisely what Yahoo is and is not, even for its ex-employees.

In any case, here are some of the best suggestions:

1. The Media Mogul

“I think they need to sell to a media company,” said one ex-Yahoo, who posits the move needs to be drastic enough to truly reset Yahoo.

In this scenario, search gets sold to Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo’s online content is combined with media assets of a big entertainment and news conglomerate.

That would make the leader of Yahoo one of the following: Bob Iger of Disney (DIS); Rupert Murdoch/Peter Chernin of News Corp. (NWS); Jeff Zucker of General Electric (GE) unit NBC Universal; or Les Moonves of CBS (CBS). (News Corp. is the owner of this Web site.)

2. The Insider

A lot of votes here for former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig and not so many for current President Sue Decker.

Why? Several ex-Yahoos mentioned a need to refocus intently on products and the need for a product-obsessed leader, but one who also knew Yahoo well and could get things moving without needing a lengthy learning curve.

“Since Dan R. left, I think there’s been a definite void (at the senior exec level) on the product/consumer expertise and advocate front,” said another ex-Yahoo.

Other execs mentioned are former Yahoos Jeff Weiner and Jeff Mallett.

But several also pointed to board member John Chapple, who is the one most insiders say they are guessing will be the next CEO, especially since he has been reaching out to Yahoos on many levels and asking questions.

3. The Microsoftie or Googler

The new top name here is obviously recently departed online ad exec Brian McAndrews, former CEO of aQuantive, whom many think would be a strong pick and would focus the company on advertising.

In addition, most of those leaving–including several technical people–all seem to agree that Yahoo needs to get out of the search business, and pronto.

Said one engineer: “I hate to say this, but as good as we can be, we cannot compete in the war that is breaking out between Google and Microsoft. And it will only get uglier.”

Other names mentioned in this category include Yusuf Mehdi and Kevin Johnson of Microsoft, as well as Tim Armstrong of Google (GOOG).

4. The Fixer

While there are a lot of different opinions out there among the ex-Yahoos I spoke to, all agree that the company is in need of a sharp operator and someone who can do what it takes to turn the company around quickly.

That means someone like former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, whose name has popped up recently, or even nontechie execs known for operational skills.

“We need a decisive leader, given how slowly it takes for things to change at Yahoo, who has a real sense of urgency from the minute he or she gets the job,” said one ex-employee.

Another former exec described it as a “two-step process.” First, the turnaround CEO needs to come in and reorient, focus, and get the company going in the right direction, then a more product-oriented person can be installed under that CEO later.

5. The Holy Grail-Steve Jobs Option

I think the most interesting idea I got from all the many former Yahoos I spoke to was that Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs swoop in and buy Yahoo.

When I laughed out loud at this notion at first, the exec insisted that it was a feasible idea, given that Apple was interested in expanding its platform beyond its now-popular devices.

It’s an interesting bit of wishful thinking, of course, to imagine a “great leader” to calmly guide the company back to its roots.

Jobs, in fact, memorably addressed a meeting of Yahoo VPs in the fall of 2007. As I wrote then: “Jobs basic message [to Yahoo]: You have great assets–just like Apple did–and now it is all about execution.”

Yes, that tiny little detail.

6. Raise the Yangtanic

Interestingly, pretty much all the ex-Yahoos I talked to–as angry as some are at him for his tenure as a CEO less successful at execution and the ensuing loss of market value at Yahoo–said they did feel there was a need for Co-Founder Jerry Yang to stay around in a significant way.

“Jerry has been a really bad CEO,” said one former employee. “But he could still be an important leader at Yahoo and give the company the kind of inspiration it so desperately needs.”

Not everyone is on board with that.

“I completely disagree that Jerry should stay around. Jerry is one of the main issues at Yahoo and he and [David] Filo must go, as well as most of the board,” said one former Yahoo. “There needs to be free rein for the new CEO to make changes and that won’t be possible if Jerry is still there. Jerry is a nice guy and his heart is in the right place but he has failed as both board leader and CEO and the company needs to start fresh if it is to have a chance.”

Adds the ex-Yahoo: “Steve Jobs would be great, but I think he is busy.”

Eerily familiar, in fact!

As you might imagine, while everyone is caught up in the current merger mania, there were a lot of previous hot-and-bothered moments now lost in the mists of time.

Did you know, for example, that AOL’s Ted Leonsis once made a $2 million bid for Yahoo (YHOO), early on? “Since there were two of them,” said Leonis to me once, referring to Yahoo Co-Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, “I thought each should get $1 million.”

While that was kind of kooky, this excerpt from my second book on AOL, titled “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL-Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for the Digital Future,” was much more serious.

At the time, late in 1999, Time Warner’s former CEO Jerry Levin was locked in difficult negotiations with AOL’s CEO Steve Case. When they reached a standstill, AOL seriously pondered acquiring eBay, while Time Warner (TWX) went looking for a link-up with Yahoo:

Here’s the excerpt from a section in the fourth chapter:

IF YOU CAN’T BE WITH THE ONE YOU LOVE

AOL and Time Warner wasted no time in trying to find alternatives to each other, scouring for as big a blockbuster as they could find across the interactive landscape.

Both were serious, but each also needed a stalking horse that might shake the other up enough to get back to the bargaining table.

Time Warner quickly turned to Yahoo.

Levin had met and been deeply impressed with a very young Jerry Yang, one of the co-founders of Yahoo, the spectacularly successful Internet directory and portal.

With the biggest Web audience, Yahoo had become a powerhouse, and it had done so with little of the rough behavior AOL was so well known for.

Its valuation had headed skyward too, making Yang a multi-billionaire in his first job after leaving college.

Yahoo was also, unlike most Internet companies, admirably profitable.

I had called Yang as soon as I got to California in 1997.

Aside from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, eBay’s Meg Whitman and Real Network’s Rob Glaser, Yang was the Web icon most central to the whole boom.

He was also a pretty nice person—well spoken, courteous and with a reputation for being very easy to deal with.

He wasn’t always, though, and I often found myself engaged in little debates with him on whatever trend was sweeping across the landscape.

We almost always disagreed, and he liked to make little digs: “Kara, The Wall Street Journal’s circulation hasn’t grown in, like, a million years.”

But his were the kind of low-level obnoxious comments you’d hear from a brother. I hate to admit it, mostly because he would mock me, but I liked him a lot.

So did Levin. So he sent [CFO Rich] Bressler to meet with Yang and the Yahoo leadership, which included CEO Tim Koogle and his No. 2, Jeff Mallett.

The two sides had several meetings in late November and early December, according to those familiar with the talks, about what the companies could do together and how both sides saw the world evolving.

But Bressler was coy, and if he had a bigger idea the Yahoo team was hard pressed to figure it out.

“He was not specific at all,” one Yahoo executive told me. “We huddled and asked ourselves, ‘Are they serious, or are they just fishing?’”

The Yahoo team was torn, since they too were worried about the valuations and wondered if they could survive without a big media partner.

They also wanted to stay independent if possible, and didn’t want to venture so quickly outside the company’s core competency or outside the Net.

Doing a deal, even if meant that Yahoo would grab a major stake, meant selling the company and ending their mission.

Unlike AOL executives, the Yahoo team thought they would surely get lost in the shuffle, and that they were ill-suited to try to run a complex media company.

They were also dubious that old and new media were really natural partners.

“We were less grand in our approach,” said another executive. “And we were a fast-growing company, so we weren’t so sure we wanted to go slower.”

Time Warner was also reticent, because of the high valuation and also because Yahoo didn’t have a huge base of paying subscribers like AOL.

Being totally ad-supported, Yahoo was a much riskier proposition for Time Warner.

And soon enough, Levin would be put off by the same whiff of arrogance from the Yahoos that he’d picked up from Case.

At a dinner with Yang and Mallett at the elegant Upper East Side French bistro Le Refuge in Manhattan, Levin started lecturing the pair on Yahoo’s inflated currency, asking how its business was sustainable.

Mallett, unfamiliar with the subtleties of the media world dance and frustrated by Levin’s cryptic nature, shot back quickly and arrogantly.

“Why are you peppering us about our business when you’re the ones without any growth?” he snapped, then uttered the most annoying Web mantra of the era: “You just don’t get it.”

The remark, more confrontational than it needed to be, made Levin cringe. A few more meetings did take place, but the Yahoo option was pretty much off the table.

I have to say I never thought that Jerry Yang would screw up the guts to actually move CEO Terry Semel out of his job and move right in as CEO.

As I have written in many posts, such as this one, I thought Semel would go, but take his own sweet time doing it, after the first promising results of the recent overhaul of Yahoo’s search monetization system called Panama were in.

“Jerry Yang (and also co-founder David Filo) is simply not someone who would ever lead a boardroom coup,” I wrote. “For anyone who knows him even a little bit, such aggressive behavior is just not in the nature of Yang, who is deliberate and not known as a boat-rocker.”

Well, he turned out to have a lot more rocking ability than I thought. While he and Semel insist this move had been long planned, that was simply not the tone that the pair were putting out at the annual meeting just last week, which I attended.

There, Semel said he “absolutely” had the fire in his belly to run Yahoo, and Yang joked about not really wanting to take over the lesser CTO job, which he is doing on an interim basis.

How Semel’s flaming gut suddenly went out, and what got the 38-year-old Yang all hyper-ambitious, will have to remain a conundrum for now.

What is plainly true is that the level of shareholder dissatisfaction, on full display at the annual meeting, when a third of investors were against re-electing one or more directors, pretty much meant the “when-will-this-overpaid-exec-go?” stories were not going to stop unless Semel exited stage right.

And Yang insisted yesterday that he is in the CEO job to stay. “I very much see the CEO role as something I plan to do for a while,” said Yang to the New York Times.

So, given that I was wrong about his boat-rocking determination, I will have to take word for it now–though I will also say I just don’t believe him at all–that he has plans to stay the course at the troubled company he co-founded in 1994.

If true, it should be an interesting ride for him and Yahoo, since he has not run Yahoo since near its founding and has checked in and out over the years.

But he has remained a potent symbol of the company, much more so than the quiet-to-the-point-of-silent other Yahoo co-founder, Dave Filo. Still, his role has always been as a visionary and a strategic mind rather than an operator.

And also its chief worrywart. In a piece I did in 1998 on its other top execs, Tim Koogle and Jeff Mallett, I wrote about his role, which has not really changed much over the years:

It is Mr. Yang’s job to worry about things like that under Yahoo’s informal division of labor. ‘I worry if we’ll be around in three to four years,’ frets Mr. Yang, whose nickname is Grumpy. An internal initiative to make sure Yahoo isn’t blindsided by the melding of TV and the Internet is named after him: Project Grumpy.”

It is a characterization that he hated, and he wasted no time in telling me so, even though it was true.

Yet that straightforwardness, often delivered in the form of sarcastic needling, is one of the reasons I liked Yang right away when I met him about a decade ago. Yang had a confident demeanor about the company’s prospects and did not mind debating you about each and every point you might make about Yahoo’s future.

Yahoo was much smaller then, and easier to manage, which Yang did not even technically do after Koogle and Mallett came on in 1995, when there were four employees. Now Yang faces a company with far-flung assets and more than 12,000 employees (there were 49 when it went public in 1996).

Whether he can handle this level of complexity and sheer size is an open question, even with the able help of Sue Decker, the former CFO who is now Yahoo’s president (and who also is not experienced as an operations exec).

We’ll see, I guess.

Another piece I did in late 2000, when Yahoo was experiencing another dip in its fortunes, seems oddly appropriate now. (At the time, of course, Yang hated the column because of this ending referencing his well-known love of golf:)

Over breakfast recently, Mr. Yang was talking about the moment in golf–one of his favorite pastimes–when one’s ball is far enough from the hole that it’s considered a challenging shot, but close enough that missing it would make you feel like a chump. It’s called a ‘throw-up’ shot, or the ‘choke zone.’

That’s a good description of where Yahoo is today, which is why there is only one really good piece of advice to give the company as it tries to sink its next putt: Line it up carefully. Hit the ball smoothly. And, of course, don’t choke.”

So don’t choke, Jerry. And call me, even if it is just to tell me why I am wrong once again.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.