Things aren’t looking so good in Silicon Valley these days. As the US economy adjusts to recession, funding for ventures is down, stock prices are falling, and online tabloids have to let go even their decadent Valley prostitution reporters.

A simple formula pays off at the Valleywag corner of the Gawker Media empire: take a mostly male audience in a notoriously sexually frustrated profession, add a dirty-talking scribe, and watch the page views roll on in.

Valleywag’s never been one to pull punches, especially if the punch puts at risk the more prudish element of the audience. But they’ve never, as far I as know, gone full-on NSFW at the site itself. Celebrity sex tapes are all the rage on the Internet, but do a search on Valleywag and only one result comes back—one for Gene Simmons.

In a t-shirt, no pants.

$300 million could be the magic number that sends Digg to new ownership, as bloggers speculate on who might end up the new top Digger.

According to the one-man investigative team known as Brian Stelter — formerly known as the guy behind the blog TVNewser, who beat the pants off most of the media reporters at the major dailies while he was still in school — the new editor of Gawker is none other than the founder of Gawker Media, the secretive and unpredictable Nick Denton himself. Stelter says he has it confirmed through several sources.

It’s always fun whenever someone discovers one of Google’s many experiments with their search interface. 99% of the time, the discovered tests never materialize as a major rollout for Google, but it’s still worth noting.

Valleywag yesterday begged its readers to click on a link to me so that it could beat Fake Steve Jobs for the title of “most clicky audience.”

So, I thought I’d post my referer log to show you who is sending the most hits. FSJ is still 7x more clicky. Too bad Nick Denton!

Last week I read an interesting article by the Alley Insider that I’ve been dying to share – mainly because it included the following Nielsen chart that revealed an interesting comparison of sites.

Microsoft abruptly fired Chief Information Officer and corporate VP Stuart Scott, and everyone’s been trying to figure out why he was kicked out.

Stuart Scott received very abrupt walking papers from Microsoft, losing his position as corporate vice-president and chief information officer.

CNet’s 2004 purchase of Webshots for $70 million became a bargain pickup for American Greetings, which paid $45 million to take it off CNet’s hands.

Cammie Dunaway, Yahoo’s Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Customer Experience Division, is leaving the company.  And the fallout isn’t pretty.

More platform rumors are flying this week. After the success of Facebook’s platform, it seems like everyone and their social network is scrambling to get their own version out. We’ve already seen rumors about Google’s and MySpace’s intentions. Today, the MySpace rumors are called into question and Bebo rumors start.

Shawn Fanning’s post-Napster endeavor has fared poorly, with layoffs and "For Sale" signs the order of the day.

There’s probably no truth to the following theories: Google’s starting its own airline; Google has a clandestine arrangement with NASA to set up data centers on the moon; the founders plan to hire their own Tattoo to shout "The plane! The plane!" for their own bored billionaire amusement.

At this point, Mountain View, California more or less is Google.  Everyone knows Microsoft’s based in Redmond, and Yahoo’s associated with Sunnyvale.  Now, shaking things up, Wikimedia will move from St. Petersburg, Florida to San Francisco.

When online phone networking company Jajah enthusiastically announced their Jajah Buttons for eBay earlier this week, they didn’t anticipate eBay’s angry response.

The $350 million cash price tag Yahoo will pay for email software firm Zimbra makes the mind reel. Especially since Yahoo just got finished with a major update for its Mail product.

Valleywag believes Yahoo hasn’t done much, a couple of months into the "100 day" plan put forward by new/interim CEO Jerry Yang. Maybe summer isn’t the best time to start the clock on something like that, though.

A few days ago, Google bought (or leased, actually) another 130,000 square feet of office space in New York City.  The new offices are located across from the old ones, creating (at least mentally) the image of another Googleplex.  The connection is also creating a lot of questions.

Readers of the magazine Business 2.0 will not see another issue after October’s has been published; Time Inc has decided to shut down the seven-year old publication.

Charles Hope of Blip.tv posted an email exchange he had with a site visitor who complained about some controversial videos hosted on the site.