Shorter version of TechCrunch: It's the "worst economic environment in our collective lifetimes. Get your ticket for the TechCrunch/LeWeb party!" If this does not make perfect sense to you, please move back to Nebraska.

Just read Alleywag's summary. Then read the New York Times' official version. I tested Google's canned example: Search YouTube for "financial crisis." Get an ad for a super-violent movie. Those Google people are smart!

Google has an office in New York, and really wants you to know just how much better they are than you. With GOOG below $300 and employee options underwater, today's featured commenter RyanDunnuck quips:

YouTube has never been this exciting. And I don't mean the puppy videos. The video-sharing site is frenetically experimenting with every imaginable form of advertising, from prerolls to rollovers to overlays. There's even that staple of late-night television — headache pills! For this, we can thank Ben Ling, the product manager who recently returned to Google from Facebook to figure out how to make money on YouTube. But surely the most absurd ads we're seeing right now are the adaptations of Google's familiar text ads displayed on Web search results. A blog post featuring two cat-with-head-trapped-in-bag videos — a staple of YouTube users' contributions to the world of cinema — has ads "by Google" slapped on top of them. In Japanese.

Click to viewThe immense former Port Authority building where Google now does business in Manhattan has an impressive history. Truck drivers once drove onto elevators and motored around the building's upper floors. Today, the place has been Googlefied with snacks, ping-pong tables, and a jillion Legos. Free scooters let staffers zip one part of the supersize building to another. But the best thing about this video? Google Docs manager Jonathan Rochelle talks up his office for 2 minutes and 42 seconds without once using the word "cool." We just wish The Big Money's camera crew had shown us the 50,000 sq. ft. Google is emptying out for sublease, too.

Google hasn't been prone to sweeping, top-down reorganizations; instead, its practice has been to expand divisions organically, and split groups up when they become unwieldy. But we hear that Google's going through a reorg now. Details are scant, but David Eun, Google's vice president for content partnerships, is getting a promotion. Eun, atypically for a Google executive, has a long resume in old media, having worked at NBC and Time Warner before joining the search engine. We'll update as we hear more; your tips are as ever welcome.

The rumor mill says Microsoft has offered to pay twice what Google offered to take over as Verizon's default search engine on phones. I'll let Henry Blodget do the business analysis here ("MSFT will really take a bath on this one"). As a Verizon loyalist, my reaction is slow-burning rage. They're going to pocket a billion bucks and make me reconfigure my phone. Amazing what you can do if you truly hate your customers. (Photo by AP/Virginia Mayo)

A tipster tells us that Google VP Marissa Mayer, who owns a penthouse apartment in San Francisco's Four Seasons, recently berated the staff there about how long it's taken to paint the lobby of the residents' entrance at the hotel-condominium complex, and stormed off before they could apologize. Oh, how nouveau riche, arriviste, tacky — is that what you're thinking? Think again! As bad as one might feel for the Four Seasons workers, one has to think Mayer's imperiousness has its plusses — at least for Google's shareholders.As vice president for search products and user experience, she's guarded against clutter on Google's homepage. And Google continues to seize market share from rivals who can't grasp the obvious lessons of Mayer's perfectionism. Memo to Marissa: We actually like you better when you're being bossy, not ostentatiously girlish. More tirades, fewer cupcakes, please.

Remember when Gmail first came out? Virtually unlimited email storage, free! A few people bitched about the ads, but even those were an improvement over Hotmail and Yahoo, which shoved ads into the middle of personal messages rather than alongside them. Nearly five years later, Gmail's new video chat feature is resoundingly meh by comparison. CNET old-timer Rafe Needleman, who got advance review access, listed shortcomings rather than breakthroughs in his writeup. Needleman had embedded in his article a self-produced video demo by one of the Google engineers who built the thing. The doofy-but-sincere video has been removed from YouTube. Dear Google PR: That's everything wrong with your company right there.

This street vendor in Mumbai has a charming approach to marketing soft drinks. If you've got a better caption than me, post it in the comments. Friday's winner was cgsofly, for "I finally found what we have in common — we're attention whores."

Mountain View's biggest advertising company went on a hiring binge, backed by what seemed like an unlimited money supply. Now, thousands of shoulda-been millionaires have only their salaries as compensation. A surprising majority of GOOG employees I know don't really like their jobs. Will they stick around for the free snacks? My guess is there's already a collaborative Google Doc on this problem floating around the HR department. You know where to send it.

"I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no," Google baldfaced-liar-in-chief Eric Schmidt told Jim Cramer on CNBC Friday, when asked if he'd take a job with the incoming administration. "Google is its own exciting opportunity." I know what you're thinking: Obama turned him down already, how cold is that? More likely, Schmidt truly doesn't want the job. He just wanted Obama to ask.Because, come on, why manage a bunch of government IT when you already run Google and park your jets next door at Nasa? The city of Washington, D.C. uses Google Docs. Schmidt doesn't need to become America's CTO, because he already is America's CTO. (Photo by Reuters/Carlos Barria)

Purchasers of the first Googlephone, T-Mobile's G1, are already discovering that with great power — root access to your phone operating system! — comes great responsibility. There's an as-yet-unpatched bug: If you type the letters "r-e-b-o-o-t", the phone reboots. A-w-k-w-a-r-d. Oh, crud, I just wrote a shell script. [ZDNet]

As recently as a year ago, Google was scrambling to get more office space in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. Now, just as swiftly, it's trying to offload it, putting 50,000 square feet up for sublet. The company has cut back on snacks in New York, as elsewhere — but real estate is a far more serious thing to trim. With less room for warm bodies, it suggests Google will soon be shedding staff.

Here's an ominous sign: Google is now apparently looking to sublet space in its New York offices at 111 Eighth Avenue. $80 a square foot! Prices negotiable! Contact CB Richard Ellis for more! [SAI]

A Russian company, Era Volodeya seeks $3 billion in damages for allegedly violating its patent on contextual advertisements, the keyword-matching technique which has made Google the largest company in online advertising. I'm waiting for some tipster to tell me that Era Volodeya is secretly a KGB front with ties to Vladimir Putin, and that this is just a follow-up to the government's move to block a Google acquisition in Russia on antitrust grounds.

What about the children? Palo Alto High School teacher Esther "Woj" Wojcicki took time away from educating future reporters to write about America's teens for the Huffington Post. In the piece, she promotes a nonprofit letter-writing project sponsored by Google and touts the use of Google Docs. No surprise there: Woj, whose daughter Anne is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin and whose daughter Susan is a Google executive, has been promoting Google's pet causes from the first. But only now, after Valleywag has twice pointed out Woj's failure to disclose family conflicts of interest, has she started to include a disclaimer. Too bad it's deceptive.Woj's new disclaimer reads:

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.

♦ ABC appears to generated the highest ratings as the election results rolled in last night. NBC came in second and CNN ranked third. [TV Decoder]
♦ Time is rushing to produce a commemorative issue of the mag by the end of the week. [HuffPo]
♦ Both People and Us Weekly will feature Obama on the covers of the next issue. [NYP]
♦ Can The Daily Show survive an Obama presidency? and how will other media outlets deal with the post-election dropoff? [Politico, AdAge]
♦ An explanation of that holography thingie on CNN last night. [YouTube]

Google won't be providing ads to Yahoo. The official Google version of the story says, "It's clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners." Then again, it also says, "That would be like trying to drive down the road of innovation with the parking brake on." I'm serious. A grownup wrote that.