All Things Digital

This past Saturday night, BoomTown attended the tony San Francisco book party for Jonathan Zittrain’s new book, “The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.”

It was hosted by megablogger Arianna Huffington and Melanie Ellison, an old friend of Zittrain’s from high school, as it turned out.

And BoomTown took our Flip video camera, of course.

For one, it was held at Ellison’s stunning Pacific Heights home, with a lot of Internet and San Francisco wattage in attendance, including Melanie’s husband, Larry Ellison, and Mayor Gavin Newsom.

By the way, Zittrain is professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, and co-founder of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

And the book is actually not about stopping the Web–perish the thought, as what would I do with my life without my beloved Internet, which I would marry if it were legal?

Instead, according to Zittrain, my beloved Web is in deep, deep trouble!

He is justifiably worried about innovation continuing and the book is a bracing call to fix some of the Internet’s serious structural and other problems, before it collapses in a giant heap of too-tightly controlled mundanity.

I’m for that! Let Web Wackiness Worldwide (WWW!) reign!

In that spirit, here is a video of the party, in which I ask everyone the key question: What is the future of the Internet?

The video includes some book party speeches and thoughts from Craigslist’s Craig Newmark, Jim Steyer of Common Sense Media, Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick, Zittrain and, of course, Huffington (and I also got her to impersonate Tracey Ullman impersonating Arianna to up the wacky quotient) .

And also three Internet clowns trying to impersonate me. Wackier still!

Here’s the video (there is an odd voice/video disconnect in the Zittrain and clown sections at the very end that I am trying to fix):

Is it just me or has the world turned upside down?

One sign: Longtime Microsoft (MSFT) nemesis and Oracle (ORCL) pooh-bah Larry Ellison gave an apparent thumbs up to the software giant’s attempt to take over Yahoo (YHOO) in an article by Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times yesterday.

After noting that the current trend toward hostile tech takeovers were due to his moves against PeopleSoft and BEA (”They are copying us,” he said. “Others would be foolish not to try.”), he seemed to say Yahoo’s CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang was too “emotional” about the situation.

Then, in the biggest surprise, the colorful Silicon Valley icon was quoted in the article: “Mr. Ellison, whose distaste for Microsoft is legendary, hinted that he’s actually rooting for his longtime nemesis over his neighbor, Yahoo. ‘I’ve certainly watched Bill for years,’ he said, referring to Bill Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and co-founder. ‘MSN is modestly successful. It would be a formidable portal combined with Yahoo.’”

Next week: False prophets–and if we are talking Web 2.0, profits!