For years, newspaper executives whined that parasitic bloggers thrived by merely linking to newspaper stories. But they're no longer linking enough: Newspapers now demand Google rig its link-counting system in their favor.

As we reported last week, Doug Bowman, Google's top designer, has confirmed that he's leaving (we hear to Twitter). Bowman's reasons for quitting are fascinating — and they show why Google's losing its cool.

After having her image frosted by the New York Times and Charlie Rose, Google VP Marissa Mayer, the cupcake princess of search, is hungry for more press. Luckily, Lesley Stahl arrived to spread more on!

Too busy partying in Austin, Dennis Crowley never replied to our questions about whether Foursquare was built on code owned by Google. He's denied it to other press, but we hear he's telling buddies otherwise.

Even though Google killed Dodgeball, Dennis Crowley reassured the socially inept that they'd still be able to find their friends at bars with his newly launched Foursquare. One problem: it may not be his.

• Jon Stewart's showdown with Jim Cramer is getting mixed reviews, mainly because both deviated from their typical personas: the normally brash Cramer was a wimp and Stewart wasn't funny. It "felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing," writes Alessandra Stanley. [NYT, Salon, Atlantic, ABC]
• TMZ and Extra have extended their coverage to the financial services industry! Isn't it ironic that TMZ has exposed more corporate misbehavior over the past few months than CNBC has? Because it sort of has. [NYT]
• Google sales chief Tim Armstrong is the new chairman and CEO of AOL. [WSJ]
• Jim Kelly is stepping down as managing editor of Time Inc. [NYP]
• Fox has dumped Peter Liguori in favor of Fox Searchlight's Peter Rice. [THR]
• More changes are ahead at the Peter Brant-owned Interview. [WWD]
• Mel Karmazin says Sirius's poor performance last quarter was due to "doom and gloom" rumors suggesting the company would go bankrupt. [WSJ]
• Jimmy Fallon finished his first week with solid ratings, beating out the numbers that Conan O'Brien typically generated. Depressing, huh? [Variety]

At last, AOL has done something right: The Time Warner Internet unit has hired Google's Tim Armstrong as its new CEO, booting the laughably incompetent duo of CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant.

Twitter, the twee San Francisco messing startup, is all hope, no revenues. That makes it irresistable to Silicon Valley's best and brightest — like Google's top designer, Doug Bowman, whom we hear Twitter just hired.

Court hearing yesterday for cover model Liskula Cohen, who's suing Google to try to force it to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who calls her a skank, which "impugned her chastity." Hilarity ensued.

The accountants have taken over the Googleplex, once a hotbed of amiably unprofitable innovation. The notion that ads would pay the way for everything has been dropped — and "fee" is replacing "free."

Susan Wojcicki, the Google vice president who's also the sister-in-law of cofounder Sergey Brin, announced that Google would start tracking the websites people visit, wherever Google serves ads — which is something like 90 percent of the Internet worldwide. Google will then assign "interests" to those users based on their online browsing, and serve up ads accordingly.

Twitteronia is a scary place to be. A Googler got violent, an NBC TV host swore, and we frightened a top AP editor — while Michelle Malkin had a breakdown. Today's twittiest tweets:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who spent much of last fall declaring the search engine unaffected by Wall Street's crisis, has admitted that the company is "not immune." But is he being honest about its plight?

A mild-mannered British physicist is trying to render Google irrelevant. Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, a grandiosely ambitious piece of software, has come up with Wolfram Alpha, a grandiosely ambitious engine of knowledge.

Twitter CEO Ev Williams and his wife, Sara Morishige, are building a house. What took so long? San Francisco's most disorganized Internet boss dude has been rich since 2003, after he sold Blogger to Google.

Why is Marissa Mayer, Google's athletically inept cupcake princess, going on such a publicity tour of late? She was in the Times Sunday. Last night, she hit Charlie Rose to make excuses for not innovating.

Oh, Kathie! After Hoda Kotb accused her of cheating on a trivia question with the world's most mandatory search engine, the TV hostess said, "I do not know how to Google." Let's help her out!

Since Valleywag broke the news that Google was closing two of its free cafés this week, they've been busier than ever as hyperentitled Googlers race to get one last taste. And complain about the lines.

The effort, codenamed "Vevo" according to the Wall Street Journal, would involve a new showcase for music videos on YouTube, with the notion of commanding higher advertising rates. Right now, YouTube makes pennies per view — if it's lucky. Most of YouTube's bandwidth-consuming video funhouse goes unburdened with revenue.

The Valley's biggest players are all racing to be the center of your online life, collecting your photos, blog posts, Twitter messages, and comments into one stream — and then dosing it with real-time ads.