All day today, the top 120 execs at Yahoo are meeting at an offsite at the Marriott in San Jose, Calif., the first such gathering of the new world order at the Silicon Valley Internet giant in the wake of 2,000 layoffs last month.

It’ll be the first time that new CEO Scott Thompson starts to more specifically explain his vision of how he’s going to drag Yahoo out of its perpetual turnaround and into a brighter future.

The main message: Focus on where Yahoo is winning and dumping everything else — and actually doing it this time.

(For those just tuning in, previous Yahoo management has talked this talk before and, well, not walked this walk very much at all.)

Thompson thinks he’s the clean-up guy, though. And, since the layoffs, he has been one busy dude, flying to and fro, working on a variety of things.

That includes everything from figuring out how to sell a part of Yahoo’s lucrative Asian assets to working on the company’s fraught search advertising partnership with Microsoft, to chatting with Google about a new one, to planning more patent attacks against Facebook and others, to — perhaps most important of all — deciding what needs to stay and what needs to go in terms of products and properties at the company.

In Yahoo’s recent earnings call, Thompson noted that he would be “consolidating technology platforms and shutting down or transitioning roughly 50 properties that don’t contribute meaningfully to engagement or revenue.”

What precisely he was talking about has been the buzz inside the company since, because Yahoo has collected a lot of stuff over the years that is has shoved into its corporate closet and forgotten about, but that keeps on chugging away with little promise.

Ever heard of Korea Kids? It’s a site in Asia that attracts decent traffic and millions of dollars in revenue, but which many sources said costs much more to operate. Or another site called Sex Tips in the U.K. or Moments on Motherhood on its U.S. Shine women’s site.

There are lots of micro-sites like this all over Yahoo, which have been created over the years for a variety of reasons that seemed sensible at the time. In addition, there is much more — from scads of useless mobile apps to much bigger but troubled projects such as Connected TV and Livestand — all of which suck up staff, resources, attention, ad impressions and more.

It’s like a never-ending episode of “Hoarders,” but grosser in many way for Yahoo shareholders.

So, presumably, if you are not in the top three in any category, that means a spring cleaning all over the company to either toss these properties out or move them to one of Yahoo’s big publishing platforms, such as sports, finance or news.

This is not an easy task, as you might imagine, since each and every property on the potential chopping block has staunch defenders inside the company and ferreting them out and killing them is, as one person inside Yahoo noted, “like hunting gophers in the dark.”

The benefit to doing so? Cost savings, focus on many fewer things that Yahoo does best and a deployment of talent to where it will pay off.

That’s the idea anyway, but it is more complex than that, since simply having massive properties to sell to advertisers is not the game anymore, as both Google and Facebook sell a range of other attributes to advertisers from better engagement to direct sales conversions to social hooks.

Thus, it’s not simply enough to kill properties — Yahoo has to transform the ones it keeps, too, to meet a vastly different consumer mentality.

That is one of the main reasons that Thompson is also stressing new business arenas, most especially commerce, an area he knows well as the former president of eBay’s PayPal unit. Thompson has told his staff that by 2014, one-third of Yahoo’s revenues should come from e-commerce.

Besides hiring away some of his staff from PayPal, sources said he has also been eying payments technology to buy and even leveraging current Yahoo properties to grow the nascent business.

Recently, for example, he has been pushing an effort to get the accidental visitors to Yahoo’s still powerful home page — those that sign in an out of its email, for example — to engage in an e-commerce transaction.

Whether moves like this will work is still an open question, but I guess you have to start cleaning up the mess somewhere.

I haven’t tested campusbackup.org, whose Student Backup service copies an unlimited quantity of word-processing, spreadsheet, presentation and PDF files, once nightly, to a remote server for $50 a year. But there are other, more versatile options I have tested that, unlike Student Backup, copy photos and music and other types of files. These include MozyHome ($4.95 a month for unlimited storage, at mozy.com) and Carbonite ($55 a year for unlimited storage at carbonite.com). All three work with either Windows or Mac computers.

I read that importing the newly remastered Beatles CDs into iTunes and listening to them on a computer or portable player is like buying a masterpiece and staring at a photocopy of it. Any truth to this? Does importing really lose that much quality?

It depends on how sensitive an ear you have. In most cases, when you import a CD into iTunes or any other software jukebox program, you are converting the songs into a compressed file, such as an MP3 or AAC file. This saves a ton of space on your hard disk, but at least subtly diminishes quality. To an audiophile, that can make a big, negative difference, especially when you add the insult of listening to the music through iPod headphones or small computer speakers. To most of the rest of us, though—especially with rock, pop, urban or country music—it’s no big deal.

However, there is a compromise. If you don’t care about the songs taking up lots more space on your hard disk, iTunes will allow you to import them in a much less compressed format called Apple Lossless or an uncompressed format called WAV. You can choose which format to use in the iTunes Preferences settings. In the latest version of iTunes, called iTunes 9, this particular option is found under the General tab in Preferences, by clicking on the button called “Import Settings.”

Previously I had a Dell and Windows and used Family Tree Maker for genealogy records. Now that I’m an Apple owner, I find that Family Tree Maker does not work on an Apple, only Windows. What can I do about this?

It seems to me that you have three obvious options. If you still have your old Dell, you could crank it up again just for the purpose of running Family Tree Maker. Or, you could buy a boxed copy of Windows and install it on your Mac, which is fully capable of running Windows and Windows programs (assuming it’s an Intel-based Mac). Finally, you could switch to one of the native Mac-based genealogy programs and import your data from Family Tree Maker via the standard GEDCOM file format used in genealogy. One such program, called Reunion, includes specific instructions on importing data from Family Tree Maker on its “Top 10 Questions” page, at leisterpro.com.

You can find Mossberg’s Mailbox, and my other columns, online for free at the new All Things Digital web site, http://walt.allthingsd.com.

Today, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has convened a two-day offsite of its managers, to bring them all together to talk about the company.

Aside from a colorful all-hands meeting she held with the whole company, the gathering is Bartz’s first major one of its top execs, sources said, and is being held on Yahoo’s campus in Sunnyvale.

Sources said they believe Bartz has prepared an organizational structure that she will unveil soon, but has not told Yahoo’s senior staff what will be shifted, what will be consolidated and what will perhaps be cut.

Her close-to-the-vest style so far, especially about her reorganization, is what has Yahoo (YHOO) execs on edge, given it is clear to those who have spoken to her that change is surely coming.

Several people inside and outside the company who have spoken with her said she has indicated that Yahoo is still overstaffed and needs to get leaner and meaner, while others said she has expressed concern about the complex decision-making process.

Today’s offsite with top staff is a shift from Bartz’s getting-to-know-’Hoo efforts since she got to Yahoo a month ago, which have largely been her meeting execs one-on-one or dropping into various staff meetings and, from all reports I have gotten so far, asking very pointed questions.

So far, it has been Bartz flying solo, with no entourage or staff, except for her executive assistant, Judy Flores, who came with Bartz from Autodesk.

“Wherever Carol goes, Judy goes,” said one exec. “But that’s it.”

And as she goes, Bartz has let loose with a lot of questions.

“She is asking the right ones, although the tone is much more tough than employees are used to,” said one Yahoo exec.

That’s the polite version, of course, with some at Yahoo reeling from Bartz’s laser-gun queries and some thrilled that those kinds of tough questions are finally being asked out loud.

“She doesn’t seem to know the current state of the Internet business that well, but she does know how to whip a company into shape,” said another exec. “It can be a little disconcerting for those Web heads at the company to get that kind of scrutiny.”

At a recent smaller meeting of top execs, for example, Bartz went around the table and asked what each did, making comments as it went on.

Two execs were a “two-in-one box,” meaning they did the same thing, to her mind. And she had to get well around the room until she could find someone who made some dough. “Finally, revenue,” Bartz reportedly joked.

Bartz has already displayed that no-holds-barred style in public, tsk-tsking those who give Yahoo unsolicited advice and offering bounties for those employees who leak info.

(BoomTown’s personal favorite from the Bartz repertoire so far: “This is not a company that needs to be pulled apart and left for the chickens.”)

Pulling apart Yahoo internally and remaking it is another story. That’s why the company is practically humming with gossip about what will happen to a variety of execs–especially those close to the former regime of co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker.

More on the possible management shifts later…