It was looking like News Corp. might lose Wall Street Journal stars Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who host a lucrative conference for the company. But the pair are staying and swimming in money. Credit a well-timed overture from AOL.

Mark Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old CEO of Facebook, was publicly interviewed on Wednesday at the D8 tech conference. How'd he do? Apparently, he got so nervous and sweaty answering questions about privacy that he had to take his trademark hoodie off.

We hear Steve Jobs has tentatively agreed to appear on stage at the Wall Street Journal's high-profile D Conference for the first time in three years. The June event could be a major landmark in the Apple CEO's public recuperation.

As co-host of the Wall Street Journal's $5,000/head D conference, reporter Kara Swisher demands best behavior from her guests. Invite her to your startup, though, and she'll taunt your chef, heckle bizdev and mock your taste.

Though she's been depicted strangling newspapers and stealing their content, Arianna Huffington was just warmly praised by the Washington Post's publisher. There are several reasons for this, starting with her comment about "very weird porn."

Carol Bartz is on a rampage. First the Yahoo CEO delivered a "fuck you" to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. At least that half-joking rebuke was somewhat cordial; today Bartz cut off CNBC's Jim Goldman with an icy "excuse me" at the start of an on-air smackdown.

Yahoo's delightfully potty-mouthed CEO dropped another one of her famous F-bombs on the Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher at the D conference today. The Journal's been promoting the incident online, but can't seem to bring itself to air video of the cussing.

We'll admit, there were some funny lines in this serenade to Rupert Murdoch at the Wall Street Journal's "D" event. But isn't buttering up the boss at the absolute beginning of your tech conference a little blatant?

Twitter has reportedly been valued by investors at $1 billion. Oprah's on board. And the company's founders are set to headline the high-profile D conference tonight. So it's odd they seem to see their own product as a repository for jokes about cleavage, bird shit and killing Jason Calacanis.

Oh, the rebellious minions of Rupert Murdoch! The Wall Street Journal has issued precious new rules for how its reporters and editors must conduct themselves on social networks. They are, of course, being ignored.

Everyone's joining Twitter, did you know? Even New York Times editor Bill Keller has gotten on board, we hear — and he's just as self-promotional as the rest! Today's other Twitter trivia.

As any political campaign manager knows, sanctimonious attacks only invite a more outraged rebuttal. The Wall Street Journal's Google-slamming editor just learned how quickly anger boomerangs online.

Twitter, the ideal medium for feigning emotion! Bonnie Fuller pretended to be shocked, Erick Schonfeld and Kara Swisher pretended to fight, and Sasha Frere-Jones pretended to function. Today's real fake tweets:

A Today anchorlady thinks her cohost is higher than a kite, a New Yorker aims to get drunk, Alex Balk perks up his ears, and everyone else pretends to work. The latest from Twitteronia:

For the media, Twitter is the new confessional. Xeni Jardin admitted to watching an illicit movie, Peter Kafka overcharged his boss, and Jeff Jarvis admitted to being an all-around fraud. Today's crimes against Twitter:

Megan Smith, a Google executive little known outside Silicon Valley, is taking a high-profile role running the search engine's in-house charity. She's part of a power couple whose louder half is AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher.

A disclosure statement is an odd place for a wedding announcement. But that is where conference organizer and AllThingsD blogger Kara Swisher has buried the news that she married her longtime partner, Google vice president Megan Smith, last night, before the passage of Proposition 8, California's gay marriage ban, made same-sex marriages illegal once more. (The couple had had previous ceremonies — including, while we're disclosing things, one that I attended — but this was the first one that was a legal marriage under California law.) This would be no one's business but their own, except for the fact that Swisher actively covers Google and its rivals.

How to wear it: Soccer mom meets Castro lesbian, with a denim shirt and blue jeans. Oh, and a Pure Digital Flip camera. How to scare them: Find a tech-company executive. Insist on interviewing them. Blurt out the most annoying questions you can think of. If they flinch, threaten to disinvite them from your exclusive Wall Street Journal tech conference.

Eyebrows cocked? Smirk at the ready? Then you, sir, are qualified to tack on wry analysis to the day's news at AllThingsD.com. Good thing Peter Kafka, Kara Swisher's latest hire at the Dow Jones-backed tech blog, is a continent away from John Paczkowski, Swisher's incumbent snark machine. Put the two in the same office, and they might just spend all day raising their eyebrows at each other.

Peter Kafka is Kara Swisher's latest star hire at AllThingsD. She stole him from Silicon Alley Insider, where he worked with Henry Blodget. At SAI, Kafka always seemed to do fine without invoking the wisdom of the crowd. Why is Kara pushing him to go on and on about nothing? His first post was the standard Web 2.0 "Hello, world." His second takes 400 words to restate its own headline. Peter, here's my first and last free rewrite. Give me credit for not saying "Kafka-esque."