All Things Digital

As you can see from this video, BoomTown should stick to poking at Yahoo’s business plans, rather than talking to its very sharp Sarah Lacy of Yahoo Finance’s new Tech Ticker site.

Some material from AllThingsD appears on Tech Ticker from time to time, linking back to our site. And BoomTown was invited to talk about various topics last week with Lacy, including in this post and video about politics in Silicon Valley.

In the piece, Lacy and I discuss the candidates, as well as issues like ubiquitous broadband access (a critical issue about which I have long maintained the federal government has dropped the ball on spearheading the development of, as it has in the past with other important issues such as the universal telephone service or the federal highway system).

While I am not “longing” for former Vice President Al Gore, as the Tech Ticker post noted, it is still true that he is the most techie of any politician in recent memory.

I Obamapolize, but it’s true! (I also Obamapologize for my weird hair and lack of makeup, but I never appear on camera in BoomTown, so I am not going to when visiting Sunnyvale, Calif.)

Also below it is the hour-plus interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Sen. John McCain last May at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, at a time when he was considered the longest of long shots for the Republican presidential nomination.

So much for predictions!

How far ahead of the political curve is our D: All Things Digital conference?

So far that we put all those bendy-straws-in-the-wind television pundits to shame!

Case in point: At D4, we invited former Vice President Al Gore to come just before everyone decided he was the best thing since organic whole-wheat sliced bread.

And at D5, held last May, we invited Sen. John McCain of Arizona to talk about things like tech policy and Iraq, during a time when most had written him off in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

Not so, it seems, after Comeback Jack’s big win in New Hampshire last night.

Given our powerful psychic political skills, we are keeping our next political selection sealed in a mayo jar in the back of ATD HQ.

But to see what McCain is all about, here’s an hour-plus interview with McCain by Walt Mossberg and me:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

I stopped on by Google’s Zeitgeist yesterday to say hello to Washington Post CEO and Chairman Don Graham, who was attending the search giant’s annual confab of powermongers, where they talk about big issues and mostly engage in Olympic schmoozing.

I had used my old boss Graham to make a point about the immature nature of Facebook apps in a post Tuesday. (He had sent me a digital “Hot Potato” that prompted my diatribe, so I wanted to make sure he knew it was not personal that I was not tossing it back or wherever one was supposed to toss one.)

Zeitgeist sessions are off the record, although it was crawling with press, including bigwigs like Graham and New York Times head Arthur Sulzberger Jr., as well as a spate of other movers and shakers like (Google favorite) former Vice President Al Gore.

So, given the restrictions, I decided to use my visit to further my ongoing quest to ask Web players about what’s new and what’s hyped. While there, I put the screws to longtime Internet serial entrepreneur Yossi Vardi (ICQ among others) and also Dow Jones Online President Gordon McLeod in what is a very short video.

Here it is:

While this is not exactly a “digital” story–we at AllThingsD.com like to think we have our finger on the pulse of the latest trend, including the lean, mean green one. (We had well-known Silicon Valley VC Vinod Khosla come and talk about alternative energy at D4, in fact.)

Yesterday brought news that Om Malik was going all Al Gore on us with his new Earth2Tech, a blog site “devoted to the business of clean technologies, its innovations and everything else.”

We like what we have read so far (avoid soy biodiesel IPOs, as if they were Pets.com reincarnated–DONE!) and it looks great (nice digital leaf).

Not to be outdone, we made acquaintance with writer Charles Runnette and his veggie Mercedes, whilst on a run to the most excellent Baby Blue Bar-B-Q in Venice, Calif., last night (which was deliciously oily, too).

The car, which has been converted to run on vegetable oil by Lovecraft Bio-Fuels, a popular company that converts diesel cars in the shaggy Silver Lake area of Los Angeles.

I once visited an even shaggier commune right next door to Lovecraft and can still recall the pungent Thai food smell that perpetually wafted out of the place, as its workers toiled at making the world gasoline-free. Mighty tasty, too!

Here’s my video: