As of today, we have made important changes to the All Things Digital Voices section.

Why? Well, a few weeks ago, ATD was caught up in a bit of the controversy that broke out due to louder-than-usual complaints by several traditional media companies about how their content is treated on the Web.

Without going into a long explanation: They expressed displeasure that some sites were misusing their content via aggregation. Those complaining included the editor-in-chief of Dow Jones, which owns this site.

The ensuing debate made us realize we needed to be a lot clearer and more explicit about what we are doing in our Voices section, which includes short excerpts of third-party content from outside our site, and to make those policies more prominent and transparent.

Some will disagree with the changes we have made and some will not think they go far enough. But we hope we have addressed the key issues.

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Last week, BoomTown had a delightful lunch with sharp-witted Brit Paul Carr, part of our meet-the-blogger series in which this column endeavors to introduce you to the Web’s more lively voices.

Actually, I mostly just wanted to meet Carr, whose work always cracks me up, whether he is cleverly dissing the Le Web conference in Paris last year or, more recently, writing in his regular column for the Guardian about how a “meeting with the Irish Tánaiste leads to a stolen bottle of Guinness and a lesson in handling the truth” online.

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Whatever her personal turmoil, troubled actress Lindsay Lohan–aka Lindsanity–has been the patron saint of the Web’s gossip sites, as well as magazines and more, most recently for the spectacular and restraining-orders-all-around breakup she has had with DJ Samantha Ronson.

So where did Lohan go to get some control of the crazed situation back?

Why the Internet, of course, with a pretty funny video of a spoof of an eHarmony online dating ad that is now a big hit on the comedy Web site, Funny or Die.

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In this digital era’s version of “Spy Vs. Spy,” Microsoft and Google find themselves in yet another sharp-elbowed battle to be the one to strike some sort of commercial search deal or product partnership with Twitter, many sources with knowledge of the situation said, as they also jockey for position to evaluate the potential of the much-hyped microblogging start-up.

After last week’s explosive rumor that Google was in “late-stage” talks to acquire Twitter, which BoomTown reported was wildly premature, I set out to try to sort out exactly what was going on.

As I found out, there was a lot–mostly much talking related to possible product and distribution partnerships, centered around Google or Microsoft, as both struggle to gauge the importance of Twitter.

It’s a familiar roundelay for the two most powerful companies on the Web.

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Don’t miss this weekend’s New York Times piece about the online love match made by a well-known law professor blogger, Ann Althouse, and a longtime commenter on her blog, Laurence Meade, who was smitten by her bon mots

After reading the rest of the story about how they met in digital comments and their relationship slowly moved to analog, it’s hard to imagine that people are going to hook up any other way but online in the future.

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Well-known pundit and entrepreneur John Furrier has a new blog called siliconANGLE, which went live yesterday and which he said will be a “collaboration blog for friends and colleagues.”

The site will cover the social Web and also tech trends, but Furrier said it will try for “deeper” analysis of the news.

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Recently, BoomTown had a lovely lunch with PBS new media blogger Mark Glaser.

Glaser is a longtime free-lance journalist whom I first noticed when he wrote a weekly column for the USC Annenberg School of Communication’s Online Journalism Review, post-Web 1.0 bubble, as well as for the most excellent “Media Grok” daily email newsletter for the now-defunct Industry Standard back in the midst of the froth.

He was always able to cut through that with a clear-headed tone–while maintaining a respect for what was good about traditional journalism, as well as an excitement about the possibilities of new media. Here’s a video interview I did with Glaser about where new media is today.

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About three weeks ago, Facebook and Twitter ended several weeks of serious talks, in which Facebook was offering to acquire Twitter for $500 million of its stock, which also included a cash component. While rumors of Facebook’s interest were brought up in an interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago, some shot down the idea as silly. Quite incorrectly, as it turns out, since top execs at both Facebook and Twitter were right then at the tail end of discussions, which were initiated by the privately held Facebook in mid-October, about bringing the two together. Those talks, sources on both sides said, are now over. So why did the deal break down?

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Last night, BoomTown was at the Horn Group offices in San Francisco to appear on a lively panel called “Is Social Media Killing PR?”

Focused on the “future of the media ecosystem,” it was inspired by recent blog rants by Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, all of whom have taken potshots at the PR industry as unnecessary or broken in the new social media order.

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Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

The message: They will survive! (Cue the disco ball.)

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The more things change, the more they actually do change.

At least, according to this excerpt from a 10-questions interview former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, who now contributes to Time magazine’s Swampland blog, did with Stop Smiling magazine.

In questions No. 7 and 8 here, she discusses the huge differences in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, in terms of blogs, and how the image of bloggers has shifted dramatically with mainstream media.

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Did I say that there was no limit to my pandering in order to raise the most money of all in the DonorsChoose.org’s Blogger Challenge 2008!

I did, indeed!

Thus, this week, the Swisher boys make their annual appearance to deliver a pitch about why you should give early and often to fund technology projects for high school students.

Well, more a threat than the soft sell actually, since they just saw the new Disney film, “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” and are clearly hopped up on tiny dog power.

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It’s been just a week, and BoomTown is rocking out in the DonorsChoose.org’s Blogger Challenge 2008, with almost $4,000 raised!

It started a week ago, with us featuring a video from my hell-froze-over dinner with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who ably endured a meal with me in support of the many school children who benefit from the unique charity.

Now, I manage to get Yang in a dress and dancing in “High School Musical” to raise even more money–yipes!–but it’s for the kids!

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If it’s Oct. 1, it must be time for the DonorsChoose.org’s Blogger Challenge 2008!

DonorsChoose.org funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors.

Last year, BoomTown did pretty well, raising $12,199 from 52 donors, impacting 1,940 students and almost scoring the grand prize of a lunch with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

Well, I finally managed to get a dinner with him, as you can see in the video after the jump.

But now I face a more daunting task–besting the naked Scoble!

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Tonight, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters had nearly identical stories, noting that Microsoft was interested in buying Yahoo’s search business, which–oh, we bloggers are so touchy when we don’t get even a smidgen of credit, aren’t we?–BoomTown speculated was just what the software giant was interested in yesterday.

To be fair, both Reuters’ and The Journal’s reports make such a plan by Microsoft even more definitive and both have interesting new details, which are intriguing.

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