Members sign up to receive code they can choose to include on their sites to alert visitors about a perceived threat to Internet freedom from legislation or elsewhere.

The Internet Defense League already has onboard sites that can motivate the online masses: WordPress, Imgur, Reddit, Cheezburger Network, Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark have signed up.

A more formal launch is planned in two weeks when Congress returns to session, according to Tiffiniy Cheng of Fight for the Future, which put the League together along with Reddit co-founder and de facto spokesperson for the Internet Alexis Ohanian.

The League alerts are meant to be like an emergency broadcast system — or a “bat signal” for the Internet — cuing activist sites to swoop in and save someone in distress like Batman would.

Cheng and Ohanian joked that their version could be called a “cat signal,” referencing Ethan Zuckerman’s “Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism,” which posits that user-generated content platforms excel at getting activist messages out to larger audiences who are there to share pictures and videos and stories about cats. That’s in part because when governments shut down these sites to block activist activity, the cute-cat-sharing masses get pissed.

Cheng’s Fight for the Future is the activist non-profit that organized an online day-long protest in response to SOPA and PIPA by distributing a tool that large and small publishers could use to black out their own sites by choice, and then to overlay information about how would-be visitors could contact their representatives in Congress.

Another collaboration between Fight for the Future and Ohanian had two crowd-funded “Don’t Mess with the Internet” billboards placed near the offices of SOPA author and Texas representative Lamar Smith last week.

Many of the sites that joined the Internet Defense League so far also participated in the SOPA/PIPA blackout, along with heavyweights like Wikipedia and Tumblr (which are not yet members).

The proposed “cat signal” actions could be something less drastic than a blackout, like a prominently displayed alert message. As the League site describes it, “The next time there’s an emergency, we’ll tell you and send new code. Then it’s your decision to pull the trigger.”

Blackout activism over SOPA and PIPA was effective but also somewhat controversial. At the time, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo called it “silly.”

“Closing a global business in reaction to single-issue national politics is foolish,” he tweeted.

Costolo later followed up to say that there were 3.9 million tweets about SOPA and PIPA on the day of the blackout, and he justified his criticism by saying, “When you’ve got an amplifier like that, you don’t pull the batteries out of the microphone.”

So it’s a good time to get some perspective on what he learned during the experience, and how he deals with the Web at his newish job at Turner’s TBS.

In some ways, O’Brien told fellow Time Warner employee Piers Morgan at the cable industry’s annual convention yesterday, things haven’t changed that much: In an ideal world, he’d like people to watch his show live, when it airs.

But he also knows it doesn’t work that way, at all. And he’s okay with that, and he’s learned to embrace YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, etc.:

When I got started in the business in ’93, the obsesssion was: Never give anything away. Don’t tell anybody … you want it to be a surprise when they watch the show. You want to tease them, but get them to watch the show.

And what we have found is true is that this is a different generation. It works differently now. You can show them exactly what Will Ferrell did [on O'Brien's show], and get it out there, so there’s no “surprise” …

The days of, “I only want people to experience me at 11, on TBS” — those days are over. The audience is too fragmented, they’re too distracted, and a whole generation is growing up that doesn’t watch television that way.

You can watch the entire 22-minute interview, which moves along quite quickly, below. Thanks to the NCTA for the video.

Here, in keeping with the Ten Things tradition of sharing more than 10 things, are 11 things about Rosenblatt:

What qualities do you like in a person?
I admire people who are curious, innovative, respectful to everyone and eternally optimistic. I firmly believe that the best days are in front of us and we must always try new things while learning from others, in order to continually grow as people.

What qualities do you dislike?
People who are constantly negative rather than being constructive, or those who are jealous of another’s success. Being positive is a state of mind and all about how you perceive a situation — is it a permanent fall or a chance to learn and get back up? I’m also disillusioned by how negatively people react to another’s success when it’s not a zero sum game.

What’s the single most important issue in the world today?
Education. No question. Whether it’s formal or informal. There is unlimited knowledge available via the Internet, and we need to find an effective way to spread this knowledge globally to people who can benefit from it.

Do you still buy CDs or rent DVDs?
No, I download all media on my iPad or stream it through services such as Spotify or Netflix.

What would you be doing if you were not in your current job?
I’d be looking for the next opportunity to innovate in the online media landscape and increase my lecturing opportunities at UCLA and USC.

What is your greatest achievement to date?
Raising three respectful kids who are curious, innovative and optimistic.

iPhone, Android or BlackBerry?
All iPhone all the time.

What site/app do you check first when you wake up?
Twitter to get some news and tweet some info. Then eHow.com, Livestrong.com and Cracked.com to see what’s new and exciting on our properties. And then I’m tweeting again.

What was the last thing you fixed?
Boy, that’s a tough one. I’d say (and my wife would punctuate the point) that “handiness” is not one of my strengths. But, I inflated a flat tire on my son’s bike last weekend, and, as of now, it’s holding air.

If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?
Freeze time, so we would all have more time in the day!

Name your favorite guilty pleasure.
Wine, paddle tennis and pizza (without cheese). The perfect day would be enjoying all three at once!

The smart money is flying out of Facebook as the dumb money piles in.

– From The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler

Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs will be the best or worst movie I’ve ever seen.

– Dan Frommer, via Twitter

That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

Curalate’s pitch: You need basic information about the way users and potential customers are interacting with your products on Pinterest, but it’s very hard to do it on your own, because users usually don’t identify the products they’re “pinning,” so there’s no effective way to search for your stuff.

The company says it can solve that with image-recognition technology, which it licenses from a  third party, and an analytics engine it created itself.

Curalate’s arrival is inevitable, because every big social platform eventually spawns a set of third-party analytics/brand tracking companies — see Twitter, Facebook. But the company didn’t exist a few months ago.

Up until late last year, Gupta’s company was called Storably, and it was pursuing another hot start-up meme, as an “Air BNB for parking and storage.”

But that one never got traction and, after six months, Gupta — a Philadelphia-based Wharton grad — looked for a pivot. He and his four-man team cast around for a new idea and, after considering some 70 ideas, landed on Curalate. At the end of 2011, the company raised a $750,000 seed round from NEA, First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures.

Now Gupta says he has 150 customers, including Kraft Foods and Time Inc.’s “Real Simple,” and he charges them up to $99 a month for his services.

Which is why Twitter is launching a weekly email tweet digest to users, essentially a summary of the most relevant Twitter messages of the past week from those you follow (and a few you don’t follow, but probably should). Users will be able to see related tweets in context, and be able to tweet directly from the mail.

I’m also hearing that the weekly digest is the first fruit of Twitter’s recent Summify acquisition. Summify’s pre-acquisition product was essentially an email service that sent users daily dispatches containing the most important news stories of the day. It’s a natural extension of the product that the team initially created.

It’s a lot like Twitter’s redesigned “Discover” tab, which the company recently overhauled to combat user confusion caused by information overload. There have been rumors that Twitter could go after Flipboard as another possible solution to its discovery problem, though Twitter seems to be taking other steps to avoid burning through hundreds of millions in its war chest.

But as The Wall Street Journal’s Director of Social Media Engagement Liz Heron points out — in a tweet, mind you — in a world where news moves and changes within the span of a few tweets, is a week too long to wait for your digest?

Perhaps so. But on the other hand, Twitter is focused strongly on acquiring new users and teaching Twitter newcomers just how to use its service most effectively. Those new to Twitter face a mishmash of hashtags, @ symbols and other jargon unfamiliar to those outside the digiterati and the well-initiated.

To boot, it’s probably best to start with a weekly digest and not a daily one. You don’t want to bury your newcomers under a barrage of email, especially when they’re still getting used to real-time news updates delivered via tweet. Perhaps a smart move would be to allow users the option to choose the frequency of receiving emails. Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, what have you.

The new Bing features a three-panel layout, with the left-most a pared-down list of straight search results. The second column appears when users hover over a certain result, and shows dedicated visual results for 150 different categories like restaurants, transit, movies and hotels that include maps, ratings and other information.

This “Snapshot” screen tries to help users take action on those results — for instance, to make a restaurant reservation or check availability at a certain hotel — without leaving the Bing page.

The third column is the most radical change from the traditional search layout — it’s a social friend list and feed that stays on the page at all times over to the right. For each query, Bing will automatically suggest Facebook friends who know about a topic as well as relevant experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Quora, LinkedIn, Google+ and Blogger.

When a user asks one of those people to help with a query, the conversation shows up in an activity feed on the sidebar and also back on Facebook.

Microsoft had considered giving users the option to broadcast — with their permission — all their Bing search queries to Facebook through its Open Graph API. That would have been super controversial, and it was dropped from the release over the last couple of weeks.

Bing search director Stefan Weitz told me that there are a couple of goals for this launch. The first is to show users that “Bing is for doing stuff.” And the second is to acknowledge that search has become too crowded, with additions like social seeming to randomly sprinkle Facebook profile photos throughout the results page.

The new interface’s three panels are, in order, “what the Web knows,” “what Bing knows,” and “what friends know,” Weitz said.

One thing that’s not clear to me is how a three-panel design that’s dependent on hovering will work within the constraints of small mobile touchscreens. Microsoft is demoing that and more at a San Francisco launch event that’s being live-streamed here.

Update: Qi Lu, Microsoft’s president of online services, replied at the event that the three-panel approach should actually ease translations to various form factors, including phones and Xboxes.

“Separating aspects allows us to customize for different form factors, so the experience can be consistent,” he said. Lu added that hovering would be replaced by swiping between panes on mobile devices.

The new Bing won’t be available to all users immediately, but people can sign up to be notified about it here.

iCloud is among the best products Microsoft has ever designed.

– Mike Monteiro, via Twitter

That pitch is also fueling a whole lot of start-ups, who want to piggyback on Facebook’s ascent by helping advertisers shovel money into the site.

Today’s example: Adaptly, which manages Facebook ad campaigns and also helps marketers buy ads on other social platforms, like Twitter and StumbleUpon.

The NYC-based company has raised a $10.5 million B round, led by Valhalla Partners; the company also brought in Time Warner Investments and Vivi Nevo as new investors. Adaptly had previously raised $2.7 million.

The company is run by freakishly young cofounders — Nikhil Sethi, 23, and Garrett Ullom, 22, both fresh out of Northwestern (Ullom didn’t stick around to graduate). Sethi (pictured above) says his company booked $10 million in gross revenue in 2011, and will “greatly exceed that” this year. (Update: That’s actually $10 million in gross bookings, not revenue, Sethi says. Thanks to Steven Kane for the nudge.)

Adaptly has around 50 employees, a bunch of whom have migrated there via Invite Media, the ad tech start-up Google bought in 2010. The two companies share a few other ties: Both have been backed by Philly’s First Round Capital, and Invite CEO Nat Turner has invested in Adaptly as well. Small world.

(An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Invite Media was a product of the Dreamit Ventures program.)

“As we said in our brief, ‘Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users own their content,’” Twitter legal counsel Ben Lee said in a statement provided to AllThingsD. “Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users.”

Twitter’s filing comes after Harris’s initial motion to quash was struck down in court. The court found that Harris lacked the legal standing to challenge the request for Twitter information on his own behalf.

Harris, a senior editor at online publication The New Inquiry, was arrested in conjunction with a massive Occupy Wall Street protest last October that blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. He was one of more than 700 people arrested.

In Harris’s defense, Twitter cites the First Amendment as grounds for support, contesting that “content that Twitter users create and submit to Twitter are clearly a form of electronic communication that, accordingly, implicates First Amendment protections.” Twitter also contends that the request is a Fourth Amendment violation (unlawful search and seizure, for those of you who skipped PoliSci 101).

The reasoning behind Twitter’s motion most likely boils down to two things: First, if Twitter users as a whole don’t have sufficient standing to defend themselves against subpoenas for information, it then becomes Twitter’s responsibility to do so. With a subscriber base of more than 140 million active users, that’s a lot of litigation to sort through. It’s simply a scaleability issue. So, on the one hand, Twitter filing a motion that would essentially put the defense back in Harris’s hands is essentially Twitter practicing enlightened self-interest.

But in another, more gallant way of viewing the case, the motion signals just how strong Twitter is on the right to privacy of its user base. Aside from safeguarding against a future of similar requests, Twitter doesn’t have to stick up for its users like this.

“In Internet meme parlance, Twitter is basically telling the government: ‘Come at me bro,’” privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian told AllThingsD in an interview.

And it’s not the first time Twitter has stood up to the government. Late last year, Twitter challenged a court order requesting information on a number of people involved with WikiLeaks, including Julian Assange. Specifically, Twitter challenged a “gag order” included in the request, which specifically barred the company from telling WikiLeaks members that the government was requesting their account information. By challenging the order, Twitter effectively let these account holders know that the government was going after their information, which allowed them in turn to defend themselves against the government requests.

This may not sound like much. But most of this litigation is dealt with by outside counsel which Twitter hired specifically to deal with these cases, and that isn’t cheap. And there’s no direct financial incentive for the company to stand up against a request for information such as this one.

In all, it’s a bold move by the microblogging company, and one it isn’t required to make.

It has been relatively quiet there in the Utah desert ever since, which is odd, because it had been such a chatty company, throwing parties to kill old outdated identities, holding complicated math contests to guess its new name, things like that.

Now it’s about to get noisy again. Effective today, you’re going to start hearing a lot more from Domo and from its employees, and not because its new product is ready. Not quite. (James tells me the company will be talking about it this summer.)

No, starting today, all employees — everyone in the company — will be required as a condition of employment to get seriously engaged on social media in all its various forms in order to make Domo part of the wider conversations taking place on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and Pinterest and the rest. It’s called the #Domosocial experiment, and will last eight weeks. James puts it thusly in a post on the company blog:

“The program is designed to get everyone here engaged with and learning from consumer and social technologies. The goal is to help us develop a better product, understand the viral nature of web offerings more effectively, assist in getting the Domo brand out there, enable better customer conversations and see what impact it all has on our business.”

Part of the intent, James told me, is a matter of geography and culture. Being based in Utah, Domo employees are probably better than their equal numbers at other Utah start-ups when it comes to being facile with the ebb and flow of the daily global conversation that takes place on all the social spaces. But they’re probably not as familiar with it all as their rivals in Silicon Valley.

James has seen this sort of thing before. He started Omniture in Utah in 1996 and by 2009 sold it to Adobe for $1.8 billion. “With Domo, I wanted to ensure that we are every bit as adept at understanding and leveraging social as any other bleeding-edge startup,” he wrote.

But on top of that, he’s turning the effort into a live case study to see just how much of a difference it makes in Domo’s business prospects, if any. The company will track important metrics and share them with the world. “We’ll track how things change week after week. The good, the bad and the ugly, it’s all going to be public,” he told me.

Though not about everything. There’s a list of “don’ts.” Don’t tweet about deals in the pipeline, don’t debate with or quarrel with the boss on Facebook. Don’t post about meetings or leak financial information.

What do employees stand to benefit? The best among them will be getting cash rewards for their performance, extra days off, that sort of thing.

What does he expect? He’s been exploring social media pretty seriously for the last six months, and occasionally now gets stopped in the local mall by people who recognize him. “You start having influence in ways you didn’t before,” James told me. He learned with a 10-page article he shared on Twitter, where he has about 12,000 followers, that he experienced a 15 percent click-through rate. “The influence will increase dramatically,” he told me. Also, Domo’s development team will have their eyes opened to the finer points of what works and what doesn’t with social features that are under development at Domo. “We don’t want to re-invent what Facebook and Twitter did, but if you’re not intimately familiar with how those things work, then how can you learn from their mistakes?”

According to sources close to the situation, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue has approached Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and co-founder Jack Dorsey about moving off the board of Twitter.

It is not clear when McCue — who became a director of the San Francisco social communications company in late 2010 — will step down, but it could come soon.

The reason, sources said, is McCue’s growing feeling that the companies are on a product collision course, with a possible troubled or perhaps more attractive result.

In other words, Flipboard will either face increasing rivalry from Twitter or will end up as a possible acquisition target for it or other companies.

“How users consume and use Twitter is a key part of its future, and that is what Flipboard does well already,” said one person with knowledge of the situation. “There is going to be an inevitable crossroads for the two companies.”

Indeed, Twitter has bought several companies that help users read and discover, such as Summify.

The goal has been to better make sense of the massive amount of data that the service produces daily; to that end, Twitter has pushed to improve its user interface design on a number of devices.

And Twitter is a big part of Flipboard’s app, which is very dependent on the tweet feed and accounts for 70 percent of its links, sources said.

Flipboard is also more of a “mobile first” company, which is where Twitter is also headed even more aggressively.

Already popular on the Apple iPad, Flipboard launched its iPhone app late last year and it is prepping a version for Google Android soon.

That’s why, in addition to being a rival, it is also an obvious acquisition target for Twitter, as well as others such as Yahoo and Microsoft.

In fact, Google already tried to buy it last year, before Flipboard did a massive $50 million fundraising round that valued it at $200 million.

Its investors include Insight Venture Partners, Comcast’s venture arm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Ventures and a spate of well known angels, such as Dorsey, Facebook co-founder and Asana dude Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, actor Ashton Kutcher and the investment company of former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin.

Co-founded by longtime entrepreneur McCue (Netscape, Tellme) and former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll, Flipboard launched to much attention in mid 2010.

Its innovative social magazine concept is attempting to make the social networking universe more accessible, consumable and, perhaps most importantly, visually arresting via its rich app.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from media RSS feeds and sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate personalized format.

Google has mounted a competitor, called Currents, as has Yahoo with its Livestand offering, neither of which have gotten much traction. In fact, sources said, Yahoo is likely to shut Livestand down completely.

There have also been a spate of other similar readers, such as Pulse and Zite.

Spokespersons for both Flipboard and Twitter politely declined comment.

That brings with it one big challenge: Collaboration. Managing accounts in such a way that many people can work on them easily and all stay on the same page. HootSuite, the cloud-based social media management service that has styled itself as the client of choice of businesses, today announced a new version, called HootSuite Teams.

The intent here is to do social media on an industrial scale. Social media teams at consumer-facing companies can easily comprise a few dozen people. Until now, companies have had to manage each account as best they can, which has led to some embarrassing gaffes. HootSuite Teams starts by enabling teams of 10 people or more, and then grows from there.

I talked with CEO Ryan Holmes last week. He said the use cases for the new version are many: Agencies that have multiple brands for clients, or big consumer companies like a Procter & Gamble, which have literally hundreds of brands, each with their own campaign. “The average big company has 25 brands that it is managing, and that gets complicated fast,” Holmes said. Add in multiple networks — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+ — and the complexity increases.

HootSuite is certainly a busy tool. Holmes told me its four-million-odd users are sending 1.5 million messages to social networks every day, which are in turn seen by 1.7 billion eyeballs. Its customers include McDonalds, Pepsi, the New York Times and clothing retailer Free People.

It has also been growing at a healthy clip. Holmes told me it took HootSuite two years to get to its first million users, another eight months to make it to two million, six months to make three million and right now it’s hitting the four-million mark. At that rate, it will hit six million by the end of the year.

No wonder, then, that there are reports that HootSuite is in the middle of raising capital. At the end of March, it raised $20 million from Canada’s OMERS Fund (the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System). Holmes told me that the company is not seeking to raise any capital right now. “I’m always talking with VCs. It’s not impossible that we won’t raise in the next little while, but we’re not in the process of raising right now,” he told me.

OMERS bought its stake through secondary markets. Before that, HootSuite raised $3 million in debt financing, on top of $1.9 million from investors including Blumberg Capital, Hearst Interactive Media, Social Concepts, Millennium Technology Ventures and angel investor Geoff Entress.

Earlier today, Yahoo’s persistent thorn, activist shareholder Dan Loeb of Third Point poison-penned another letter to the board of the Silicon Valley Internet company, demanding that Yahoo fire its new CEO Scott Thompson, as well as director Patti Hart, over bizarre inaccuracies related to their academic achievements.

“Permitting Mr. Thompson and Ms. Hart to stay with the Company after apparently violating the Code of Ethics sends a message to all Yahoo! employees that a different set of rules applies at the top,” Loeb wrote.”[Yahoo must] terminate Mr. Thompson for cause immediately given his demonstrable unsuitability to remain Chief Executive Officer and a director of Yahoo! and accept the resignation of Ms. Hart for similar reasons.”

And while many across the blogosphere — including some very clever tweets — called for his head tout de suite, that’s just not going to happen.

At least for now, at this early point in a controversy over Yahoo filing legal documents that misrepresented Thompson’s long-ago degree from Stonehill College.

In a nutshell: Thompson does not have a computer science degree, as he had maintained he did in public bios for almost a decade, a falsehood that mysteriously seeped into documents Yahoo filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’s bad news for Yahoo, for sure, on many levels, but moving against Thompson at this moment is not likely to be the answer — for the short term, at least.

That’s due to many reasons, that I like to think of it as three hopelessly complex puzzles that need solving pronto.

The What-Did-Yahoo-Know-and-When-Did-It-Know-It Question

There is no question the first thing Yahoo’s board needs to do is a thorough investigation to determine how a borked bio could proliferate so widely and for so long.

Most importantly, Yahoo will have to reveal if Thompson actually gave them this incorrect information, as he aggressively lobbied for the then-open CEO job.

As I had previously reported several times, Thompson cold-emailed a Yahoo director — Intuit CEO Brad Smith, as it turns out — despite not being on the list of potential candidates. Thompson was then shuttled over to Hart, who was running the vetting process with the help of headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles, and hired within weeks.

Oddly, sources said Thompson never filled out the required informational papers for the job, nor did Heidrick conduct the normal background check on him. Instead, another forensic firm Yahoo hired did the work.

If it turns out Thompson gave any of them the bad bio info, it would be quick curtains for him.

But if Yahoo’s board members obtained his info on their own, the next key query would be how no one at Yahoo — especially its legal and compliance staffers, as well as outside help — managed to catch the problem during the vetting of Thompson.

Here are some good questions to start with:

Who put a faux computer science degree on Thompson’s bio in the first place, why and when did it happen?

Where did Yahoo get the inaccurate information?

Who was in charge of checking Thompson’s academic record for Yahoo?

And, who checked the work of the checkers?

The problem is made more complicated, because correct information was easily available in the SEC filings of eBay for years, since Thompson was head of its PayPal payments unit.

While the resume information was indeed wrong on eBay’s Web site and on numerous bios of Thompson for years, how did eBay legally get it right while Yahoo did not?

That calls into question the expertise of the company, its directors and those they hired to make sure execs were completely on the up and up, a task they clearly failed at.

If rank incompetence is the reason, which it looks like it might be, expect certain board members and other Yahoo staffers to go, along with anyone who helped in the Thompson vetting, or lack thereof.

Unless, of course, the gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight actually did shoot straight and some one at Yahoo found out about the educational discrepancy before the new CEO was announced, but declined to fix it.

While sinister, such a scenario is not entirely implausible, given how much pressure Yahoo was under at the time to hire a CEO quickly, due to Loeb and his looming proxy fight.

If any evidence were to surface that this was so, it is curtains all around, which would rain the kind of disaster down on Yahoo’s Sunnyvale HQ that would make Loeb’s attacks look like a Nerf battle. Instead, it would be “The Hunger Games” — except that no one survives.

The Chaos-in-Sunnyvale Conundrum

Which brings us to the profound implications of Yahoo jacking its second CEO within six months.

While it’s easy to yell “Fire the CEO” on a crowded Twitter, it’s simply not so easy in practice.

How long did it take Yahoo’s lugubrious board to figure out Carol Bartz needed to go? A … long … time. (And, she had a CS degree!)

More to the point, Thompson — and his not-so-merry band of consultants from Boston Consulting Group and, this week, McKinsey & Company — has only just completed a massive layoff of 2,000 employees and a jarring restructuring of management.

He’s also in the early stages of rolling out a new and decidedly still-squishy strategic plan to top execs (also just this week), along with working on some other key initiatives.

That includes renegotiating its search partnership with Microsoft; noodling around on a possible deal with Google; contemplating the sale of a variety of assets; and — oh, yes — trying to take on social networking Godzilla Facebook over patent infringement.

Busy much?

But, most importantly, Thompson is now the umpteenth Yahoo CEO to be working on the never-ending talks with its Asian partners over selling back a piece of the company’s lucrative stake to them.

While Yahoo CFO Tim Morse and head lawyer Mike Callahan are the point men on the deal, the lack of CEO would be an issue in the now-proceeding again talks.

This is a sale that must — and I underscore must — get done and soon, giving Yahoo much-needed breathing room and a whole lot of cash to fork over to increasingly disgruntled shareholders.

So, expect Yahoo to try to milk that deal for all it’s worth in the coming week, in order to give the appearance, at least, of positive forward momentum.

And, like it or not, Thompson has to play a key role in it getting done.

Thus, the likelihood of wait-and-see over point-and-shoot on Thompson is higher than you might think.

That’s especially true given four members of the board are leaving within six weeks and have either or are in the process of being replaced by new members.

Then, Thompson will be their problem to solve.

Again, no small thing, since the old crew — led by feckless Chairman Roy Bostock — is not likely to want to end its appalling tenure with yet another disaster.

Such a move would further tarnish the legacy of its outgoing directors, although I am not sure how it could be any more sullied, given their consistent record of one bad decision after the next.

What do I really think? I think this cursed board will maintain its 100 percent score of doing the wrong thing at the right time.

It could be a different case with the new directors, of course, who all seem pretty sharp and not as easily impressed by a record of failure.

They will surely be monitoring Thompson carefully, as will employees, who have taken to internal message boards with a rage not seen in a while over the resume debacle.

Their morale might be one uncertainty impacting Thompson’s fate. If a lot of key employees continue to bolt Yahoo or those remaining more loudly express their disdain for the bio antics, the new directors might listen.

The Whatever-Loeb-Says-We-Won’t-Do-Till-Later Head-Scratcher

Which brings us back to Loeb, whose noisy campaign to grab seats on the Yahoo board has certainly hit home this week.

And, though Yahoo likes to ding him a lot, since he started his campaign of terribly entertaining investor terror, a lot of what he’s been calling for has happened.

That includes a major flushing of the board — with five longtime members, including co-founder Jerry Yang, going, going and gone.

In addition, Loeb brought pressure to slow down some questionable deals, from Yahoo’s PIPE dream to a tax-free spinoff in Asia in a deal only an accountant could love.

He’s also — though they try to deny it — got the Yahoo directors in the dangerous habit of reacting to him, rather than playing their own game.

While the Yahoo board has resisted any deal with Loeb (pictured here), blaming him for rejecting their kind offers of settlement, it is he who is setting the tone more than Yahoo.

And that tone is of alarm and trouble and chaos at Yahoo.

That’s not going to work to convince other Yahoo investors to back his cause — in fact, Loeb has a decidedly uphill battle to win his proxy challenge — he has still scored a direct win with the bio relevations.

So far, though, Loeb has not sunk Yahoo’s battleship, so it is unlikely the board will acquiesce to his latest demand of Thompson being fired by noon on Monday.

Maybe it will eventually, or maybe it will just scold Thompson or maybe it will do nothing at all.

All that is an unknown — a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, with a lot of managerial incompetence thrown in. And that, most of all, is the sad definition of today’s Yahoo.

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28 years ago (May 3rd) with $1000, instead of studying for finals during my freshman year at the University of Texas, I started Dell.

– Michael Dell, via Twitter