BoomTown was intrigued when Mind-Your-Own Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter, penned a blog post yesterday about the microblogging service changing its prompting question.

Now, above the little Twitter box, it reads, “What’s Happening?” and not the original tweet query, “What are you doing?”

While the blogosphere covered this as if it were a moment of monumental meaning, most were ignorant that the true beacon of innovative What’s-Happeningness does not reside in Silicon Valley.

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Hollywood director James Cameron is well known for his heavy use of special effects and techtastic techniques in his movies, which include “Titanic,” “Aliens” and the first–and best–two “Terminator” blockbusters.

In a few weeks, Cameron is hoping to hit geek gold again with a 3-D sci-fi juggernaut called “Avatar,” which is about an indigenous blue-colored tribe and their inevitable greedy enemies.

Thus, cue the Smurfs!

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When in San Diego recently, BoomTown paid a visit to Qualcomm and its Chairman and CEO, Paul Jacobs, to talk about a new “smartbook” device the wireless-technology company unveiled last week, but that won’t make its debut until the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show in January.

There, Jacobs will show off what is essentially a combination of a smartphone and a netbook.

Obviously, it’s going to be a competitive market and, really, Apple, with its upcoming tablet computer, is also pushing into this mobile-phone-that-ate-computers space.

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Oh dear, just a single week away and Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every gossip site on the Web is aflame in expectation of the second installment of the young-vampires-in-lust movie series, “Twilight: New Moon.”

As pictures of its are-they-or-aren’t-they-holding-hands (um, they are) stars, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, rocketed around the Web last week, prepare for an online and offline outpouring of teenage swooning over the whole overwrought love story, which is set to debut just after midnight on Nov. 20.

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In this ruthlessly funny video–especially for such a sweet-looking young lady–singer Taylor Swift manages to ice pretty much everyone who ever dissed her.

And Kanye West’s antics at the MTV Music Awards in September are not the only ones getting a musical smackdown from the 19-year-old, who won the Country Music Association’s entertainer of the year award last night.

Sing it, sister.

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Hollywood is selling the end times hard this week with the opening of “2012,” a blockbuster-style movie about the last days of the world for humanity.

Apparently, we were warned!

It’s based on junk theories about how the 5,125-year-long Mayan Long Count calendar ends on Dec. 21, 2012, which can only mean that so goes the universe.

So, until the apocalypse, enjoy the trailers.

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ABC certainly has been taking its sweet time in releasing the first episode of “V,” a sci-fi television series that debuted earlier this week on the Web in any substantial way.

The premiere of a redo of a 1980s miniseries about a lizardy alien invasion disguised as a peace mission by outerspace hotties turned out to be a big broadcast hit, but it is hard to watch online.

Until tomorrow, that is.

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The new MSN homepage debuts tonight and you would be completely correct in thinking the recipe Microsoft has cooked up to inform its design ethos–white, clean and hiply modern–has definite echoes of a certain longtime tech rival.

That would be Apple, of course, with a big dollop of Twitter and Facebook tossed in, and finished off with a generous sprinkling of Microsoft’s new Bing search service.

For those who care: The MSN butterfly logo remains, although it appears to have lost a lot of weight.

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Here’s the new trailer for the upcoming videogame-to-live-action Disney fantasy adventure movie, “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.”

It still looks an awful lot like a videogame and is chock full of special effects–but the adaptation also seems to feature much in the way of shirtlessness and mascara-wearing on the part of star Jake Gyllenhaal.

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Yesterday, BoomTown moderated a panel at California’s Women’s Conference titled “Changing the World Through the Web” for a crowd of several thousand people.

The panelists included Hollywood actor/producer, Katalyst co-founder and Twitter demigod Ashton Kutcher; Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg, who leads the social networking site’s elections, breaking news and social change initiatives; Premal Shah, president of online microloan site Kiva.org; and Joe Rospars, founder and creative director of Blue State Digital and new media director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Here are video interviews I did with each of them.

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Microsoft’s MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to power music offerings on the giant portal.

While sources at both companies cautioned that the talks are still early, Microsoft–which has its own music site that it programs with original and partnered content–execs are interested in goosing its offering.

That’s because MSN Music consistently ranks substantially lower than other big online music properties in terms of traffic, while MySpace Music is always near the top.

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One word: Shameful.

So, no surprise that Yahoo, which is trying mightily to burnish its image worldwide, quickly apologized for the presence of lap dancers onstage at its Open Hack Day in Taiwan last weekend.

Top Yahoo execs were at the hack event, although it’s not clear if they attended the lap-dancing part of the program, which seems to have a history of this sort of Pussycat-Dolls-meets-geeks tone.

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This week, “Saturday Night Live” reprised one of its better skits, “The Rock Obama,” spoofing the health-care debate.

In it, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson does to some politicians just what a lot of us would like to do.

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It looks like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will have her hands full with pretty dicey nuclear and terrorism issues in North Korea and Pakistan this week, but she managed to find time last week to try her diplomatic hand at working out the state of emergency between late-night television talk show host Conan O’Brien and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.

Here are the videos.

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For many years now, one of our regular attendees at the D: All Things Digital conference has been award-winning movie and television director, producer and writer Barry Sonnenfeld, who is–as it turns out–a not-so-closeted geek in his spare time with a gadget column for Esquire magazine called “The Digital Man.”

Now he is branching out to a vlog about his geek passions on Crackle, which will appear every two weeks from wherever he is–either from his homes in East Hampton, N.Y. or Telluride, Colo., or from Hollywood sets.

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