In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said:

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

Zittrain was being quoted in a New York Times piece today about the use of Twitter by those protesting the election results in Iran, as other means of modern mass communications–such as email, Facebook and texting–got blocked.

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which is kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

Stupid is as stupid does, of course, but what it does illustrate quite smartly is that word of mouth–a concept as old as humanity–remains the most powerful way of distributing information.

While not always reliable, masses of people chattering away has always been the most fluid way in which news has been disseminated and received. Although much of that can be mundane and borderline idiotic, one cannot deny its impact.

What one can deny, though, is the hype that inevitably follows in the wake of every one of these breakthrough technologies like Twitter.

That’s a mistake, because it is how the tools are used by people, more than the tools themselves, that should be the focus.

Still, the media hyping of tech tools as savior is reliably annoying.

Television, of course, changed the presidential elections, as radio had before that.

And, more recently, weren’t mobile phone cameras critical in reporting the bombing in London’s Underground in 2005?

Or wasn’t Facebook key to protests in Burma in 2008?

And, even more profoundly, didn’t the simple fax machine get lauded during the uprising in China’s Tiananmen Square in Beijing as an heroic gadget?

Reported Time magazine in 1989:

“When word of the massacre in Tiananmen Square first reached the University of Michigan, the 250 Chinese students studying there jumped into action: they purchased a fax machine. Daily summaries of Western news accounts and photographs were faxed to universities, government offices, hospitals and businesses in major cities in China to provide an alternative to the government’s distorted press reports. The Chinese students traded fax numbers back home along the computer network that links them around the U.S. The fax brigades at Michigan were duplicated on many other campuses.”

Ironically, hardly anyone today uses a fax machine at all, having moved onto more effective methods of sending out critical news, data, pictures, updates and more.

Like Twitter today, which deserves this moment in the sun, to be sure, as long as it lasts.

Which it won’t, as people move onto the next way to do what they have always done, which is to connect.

As for tomorrow, who knows?

After all, digital life was, is and will always be like a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re gonna get.

Almost-First Daughter Meghan McCain (pictured here) gave the Republican Party the analog equivalent of an unhappy emoticon yesterday in a column in The Daily Beast, predicting the political party will lose power quicker than a faulty iPhone if it does not get more Web-savvy pronto.

BoomTown always liked GOP Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s sassy spawn, who had a pretty good blog–deliciously called McCain Blogette.com: Musings on Politics From a Pop CultureGirl–during the campaign and was always coming out with some little nugget that I am sure made her PR handlers cringe.

Well, there she goes again!

In a post titled, “Why Republicans Don’t Get the Internet,” Meghan McCain noted flatly:

The Republican party isn’t exactly Internet savvy. That’s no secret…This has been a source of personal frustration for me for a very long time. Unless the GOP evolves as the party that can successfully utilize the Web, we’ll continue to lose influence.”

Thankfully, it gets worse!

Writes Meghan:

I know this aggravates the old school political operatives to no end, but it’s true. The Obama administration understands that my generation spends most of its day on a laptop or a BlackBerry, and that using the web is easy way to communicate their ideas to their constituents. Making a website, Facebook group, or YouTube video entertaining and enticing is where grassroots campaigning begins. President Obama currently has around five-and-a-half million supporters on Facebook; my father has around five-hundred thousand.”

Sorry, Dad!

But apparently not all that much, because she ended her piece with a zinger about the GOP’s new Web effort, the Rebuild the Party site, essentially declaring the party a wizened Luddite with no hopes of ever beating the BlackBerry-loving Obama.

…The website is about as provocative as a blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. At the time that I write this, the video on the homepage features various individuals, most of them I would guess between the ages of fifty and sixty, explaining why they consider themselves Republicans. Had I still been an independent, there is nothing about this website or video that would sway me as a twenty-four year old woman to join the GOP…Until the Republican party joins the twenty-first century and learns how to use the Internet, its members will keep getting older and the youth of America will just keep logging on to the other side.”

Meghan McCain is definitely right about the unusually sleepy video–which only pops when they focus on dead Republican former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Teddy Roosevelt:

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.

While you might have seen it everywhere by now, BoomTown promised this would actually be the last post of the multitude of video spoofs about Alaska Governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that have popped up on the Web of late.

Thus, here is Tina Fey’s version–which, as I expected, is the best–of Palin on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend. She is joined by Amy Poehler, who does a perfect slow-burn impression of New York Senator Hillary Clinton.

The parody deftly managed to be funny without being sexist–even though it mocked the issue of sexism in politics–although some surely will accuse it of being so. They’re wrong.

In any case, the best line was actually Fey/Palin’s interpretation that global warming was “just God huggin’ us closer.”

While Palin did not give an official reaction to the much-anticipated comedy sketch, reporters on the campaign trail reported she did watch it and overheard her comment that she once dressed up as Fey for Halloween.

Life is truly stranger than fiction.

Here’s the video, which will doubtless be one of the most popular on the Internet this week:

Today, BoomTown boards the Acela Express from New York’s Penn Station to D.C.’s Union Station to attend the Senate hearing on the Yahoo agreement with Google to outsource some of its ad search business.

Titled rather ominously, “The Google-Yahoo Agreement and the Future of Internet Advertising,” the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights (eek!) will hear testimony at 10:30 a.m. at the Dirksen Senate Office Building from a passel of Internet reps, including those from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google.

It is chaired by Sen. Herbert Kohl (D., Wis.).

Will there be a lovely video of event? Indeed, there will be!

Added plus: I went to college and even worked on Capitol Hill, all before toiling at the Washington Post (Hey, Marcus!) for a dog’s age, so I know my way around the place.

And, as BoomTown readers might recall, I am not for the deal, mostly because it gives Google even more market power, even though the partnership is limited.

As I wrote:

As someone who has been a longtime critic of Microsoft’s (MSFT) historically thuggish tendencies, BoomTown finds it a little hard to believe that Yahoo and Google think that they can get away with any kind of significant search-ad outsourcing deal that would move the needle at Yahoo … .

And while it might be a long-cherished dream of Google’s to take over Yahoo search–and also get the chance to return to the scene of the crime, since Google got its first big push from doing Yahoo search, before Yahoo (YHOO) wised up too late–there is simply no way this will be allowed by regulators. Nor should it.

Still, you have to almost admire the chutzpah of the search giant in making this move, if the sheer and unadulterated arrogance of it wasn’t so distracting.

Because, while Google (GOOG) has almost none of the obvious menacing aggression that characterized Microsoft when it thoroughly dominated tech (although all those beach bikes on its campus inexplicably creep me out a little bit), the company still cannot be allowed to have a monopolistic share of the market.

It is bad for advertisers, it is bad for consumers, it is bad for innovation, no matter how well-intentioned Google is.”

So, you might imagine, I am looking forward to biting into this tasty piece of political theater!

Here is the list of speakers:

David Drummond
Senior Vice President
Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
Google
Mountain View, Calif.

Michael Callahan
General Counsel
Yahoo!
Sunnyvale, Calif.

Brad Smith
Senior Vice President and General Counsel
Microsoft
Redmond, Wash.

Matthew Crowley
Chief Marketing Officer
Yellowpages.com
Glendale, Calif.

Tim Carter
President and CEO
Askthebuilder.com
Cincinnati, Ohio

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

But--as many readers have requested--they will all be available in their entirety over the next two weeks in this column.]

Here’s Part 4 of 6 of our interview with Rupert Murdoch, chairman and CEO of News Corp. (NWS) (owner of this site and the conference), conducted by me and Walt Mossberg, in which he talks about politics (Hello, Sen. Barack Obama! Not so much, Sen. John McCain!), broadband, Apple, mobile devices, his definition of “fair and balanced” and Keith Olbermann’s craziness.

Here are the rest of the videos of the interview:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 5
Part 6

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next two weeks in this column.

Kicking off the proceedings will be what most of the attendees at the conference told us they considered their favorite interview, which Walt Mossberg and I did with News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch.

Full disclosure: News Corp. (NWS) owns Dow Jones, which owns this site and the conference.

Nonetheless, Walt and I treated Murdoch in the same way as we did all the others we interviewed and think we succeeded in being–someone has to say it–actually both fair and balanced.

The interview with one of media’s most powerful moguls was wide-ranging, including: talking about the takeover tussle between Yahoo (YHOO) and Microsoft (MSFT) (Murdoch was mystified as to why it got botched); the future of newspapers (not so pretty for most); what he will do with The Wall Street Journal (cut the number of editors, for sure); News Corp.’s MySpace (Murdoch does not use it or Facebook either); and, perhaps most interesting of all, his take on this season of presidential politics (Barack Obama?).

There was more, of course, but judge for yourself how Murdoch did.

Here’s Part 1 of 6, which covers the future of print media, including the News Corp.-owned Journal:

Here are the rest of the videos of the interview:

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

So, as is BoomTown’s patriotic duty, I was watching the returns come in from Pennsylvania in the draggy war that has become the quest for the Democratic presidential candidate nomination between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as I also pondered what would happen next in the even draggier Microsoft (MSFT)-Yahoo (YHOO) takeover battle.

Then a smart friend in the industry wrote me an email, stating the obvious:

This msft/yahoo deal reminds me of the democratic nomination. we all know how it’s going to end but it’s going to be nasty nasty nasty all the way till the end, with enough bitterness generated along the way to present a reasonably likelihood of a pyrrhic victory. the ultimate loser can only succeed in doing well enough to drag out the process and inflict more pain.”

My friend wins the pundit prize.

And, in other words, the only winners in both these ugly contests are obvious: Republican candidate Sen. John McCain and Google (GOOG).

Which are, ironically, the pair both other pairs should actually be most focused on defeating.