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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Here’s a lovely video BoomTown did last night at our All Things Digital annual BBQ, at which the crackerjack team at our little rogue operation inside Dow Jones goes analog, gnaws on some ribs and trades tech tales.

Last night, of course, much of the chatter was about what went down at the Apple event in San Francisco yesterday, at which CEO and Supreme Leader Steve Jobs made a grand reappearance onstage after a liver transplant.

Walt Mossberg and Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski were there and give their spicy reports.

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BoomTown could not resist posting this photo for posterity’s sake, taken by All Things Digital Webmaster and master photog Adam Tow.

It pictures a quartet of the tech media’s heavy hitters, all attending at the Apple event in San Francisco today.

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Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics start-up, will be leaving to start a foundation related to Alzheimer’s disease.

With Anne Wojcicki, she founded the high-profile company–whose Series A investors include Genentech, Google, and New Enterprise Associates, as well as Wojcicki’s husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin–in 2006.

Avey noted in an email to staff, which is posted in its entirety below: “I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.”

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Last night, onstage at Lincoln Center in Manhattan, my most excellent partner, Walt Mossberg, interviewed well-known techno musician Moby about music and entertainment in the digital age.

The wide-ranging talk was part of an ongoing cultural festival series organized by The Wall Street Journal, called Summer Scoops Live.

Here are some video clips of the event and more.

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Yesterday–in a somewhat rambling and also riveting blog post about charging for content–serial entrepreneur and perennial gadfly Mark Cuban made a very important point that execs at every large media company should take to heart as they try to cope with the digital challenge.

Use your noggins, why dontcha?

He also threw out some very good ideas for doing so.

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Twitter will unveil a new main homepage next week at Twitter.com, said co-founder Biz Stone, in order “to better show who we are.”

In an interview with BoomTown this afternoon, Stone said the current page is essentially confusing to the masses of people who come to it, made aware of the microblogging service by the massive media hype it has received over the last year.

People arriving at the new main homepage will be greeted by a search box, information on Twitter trends and a panoply of more specific information about how they can use Twitter.

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As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

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Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your Apple iPhone or computer, originated at the Stanford Research Institute and spun out as an artificial intelligence project financed by DARPA.

In its demo for Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Siri tried to show how it was an alternative to search.

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As CEO and chairman of Mozilla, respectively, John Lilly and Mitchell Baker have overseen the huge growth of Firefox, the popular open-source browser.

The pair talk about this and more in an interview with Walt Mossberg at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

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The search for the perfect remote control continues, this time from Canesta, a San Jose-based company specializing in 3-D “natural interfaces.”

That means controlling your television via a series of gestures–including a wave and more.

Canesta demoed the new technology to control TV functions, from changing channels to navigating more complex menus, at the seventh D: All Things Digital.

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As most know by now, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer introduced the software giant’s relaunch of its search offering, dubbed Bing, onstage at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference.

You can see that here, as well as Ballmer demoing the product, which is Microsoft’s biggest and priciest attempt yet to catch archrival Google and Yahoo in the search business.

It is a market where the typically dominant Microsoft is a mouse in comparison. But, no surprise, that did not stop Ballmer from doing some roaring about Bing.

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What can one say about Mark Cuban that he can’t say himself?

Not much, as you will see from this sassy onstage interview he did with Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, where he talked about everything from the idiots of the Internet to the subsidization of Web video by Google.

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Last week, after much delay, longtime Internet exec Julius Genachowski was confirmed by the Senate as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

It is an important role for the future development of the Web, of course, although it took a dog’s age into the new Democratic administration to approve him.

Hopefully, he and the other commissioners can soon get to work on a wide range of major digital issues, such as a national broadband plan that does not cost Americans a fortune.

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Over the last weeks, News Corp. Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller and MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta have had their hands full directing massive layoffs at the flagship social-networking site, as well as throughout the Fox Interactive Media division.

The pair discussed the many challenges faced by the giant media company in its digital enterprises in an onstage interview at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference last month.

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