By Tom Foremski

I really need to wear my tin foil hat more often these days because I've always wanted to host an event in the tower of the fabulous DeYoung museum in Golden Gate Park. I've been hosting First Fridays with Foremski at the DeYoung but never in the tower. . .

My good buddy Om Malik (BTW I am T+Om . . . a value ad :-) beat me to it Wednesday evening.

I turned up with my friend Kathryn and rapidly ran into lots of my favorite people. First was Gaurav Dhillon, former head of Informatica, now leading Jaman.com.

Vivek Randive, CEO of Tibco (Tibco is a sponsor of SVW) turned up looking very rock star, with dark shades, in leather and black. Plus, the delightful Oceana Rain was on his arm. (The shades were related to an unfortunate dust storm on the ranch of Tom Siebel in Montana (the ranch is 25 miles from end to end. Ask Vivek for the story...)

GigaOminous

Om got up and spoke and mentioned me, and I told him to go to hell, just for the hell of it. Then Jim Louderback, the new CEO of Revision 3 (former head honcho of PC Magazine) got up on stage and said Revision 3 was sponsoring a GigaOm video show. (I'm always happy to see GigaOm following in the footsteps of SIlicon Valley Watcher . . . :-)

I teased Jim Louderback about leaving the sinking ship of media at PC Magazine. As the new CEO of Revision 3 he said he is going back to his roots. He has an MBA.

MSFT Gold

The Digg founders are behind Revision 3 and Jay Adelson was there. I managed to button hole him for a bit and ask him about the deal Digg announced today with Microsoft, ditching long time partner Federated Media for advertising services.

I asked what kind of deal MSFT was offering? Jay wouldn't say except to say that it was very competitive. Is MSFT offering 100 per cent of ad revenues? Is it more than 100 per cent? He just smiled.

My guess is that MSFT is trying to buy all the big web sites with ad revenue sharing deals that go beyond 100 per cent. Why not? Microsoft has the money. It can cut off Google AdSense ad network at the knees, or considerably higher--it is nearly 50 per cent of GOOG's revenues.