Well, it’s not like Twitter’s investors are Britney Spears or anything, but somehow, the $1 billion valuation of Twitter deserves a BoomTown all-lenses-shooting response.
Thus, the crack team at All Things Digital went all out in trying to capture one such investor in his true state.
Click in to see photographic proof!
On the spur of the moment yesterday–as Los Angeles was gridlocked by the memorial service for pop legend Michael Jackson–BoomTown decided to pay a quick visit to Harvey Levin, who runs TMZ.
Located on Sunset Boulevard–natch!–TMZ is the celebrity news Web site that actually broke the news of Jackson’s death, before any other media outlet.
And it has pretty much led the coverage as the sad story has unfolded–and keeps doing so.
BoomTown is at the lovely Santa Clara Marriott in Silicon Valley at the 2009 Yahoo annual meeting, liveblogging the event, which should be spectacularly dull.
Here is a rundown of what went on.
10:05 am: The meeting kicks off with a little video presentation with various and sundry television talking heads saying “Yahoo” in quick succession.
Actually, this was the year during which all of those hype-magnets repeated “Twitter” so many times that it has began to make my ears bleed.
But I like the spirit of trying to make Yahoo seem relevant and innovative again.
Oh, Scooby-Don’t…
You could not be more wrong in your post last week–titled, “Why Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are wrong about naming Web 3.0 ‘Web 3.0′”–about Walt and I being wrong about naming Web 3.0 “Web 3.0″ in an essay we posted at the start of our D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.
I know writing “Kara Swisher,” “Walt Mossberg” and “Wrong” is well-nigh irresistible, but your solution of calling the digital era we are in the “2010 Web” is equally confusing and incorrect.
BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.
Well, this was certainly predictable–the mindless piling on of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang now taking place in the blogosphere, in the wake of yet another setback for the troubled Internet company.
This time, it comes after the collapse of the search advertising deal with Google yesterday.
BoomTown is not saying the co-founder of Yahoo does not deserve criticism for how he has run the company since last summer.
Nonetheless, it is simply lazy to just call for Yang’s ouster as the panacea for what ails the company. It’s a feel-good suggestion, mixed with a creepy mob mentality, that offers no clear path to improvement.
In a tempest-in-a-teapot political scandalette, Republican Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain used images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in a television ad attacking his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, as a celebrity.
It was tasteless and also offensive to Hilton and Spears, which seems an almost impossible task–way to go!
Now, wasting no time in taking advantage of the brouhaha and drawing attention just where it should be–to herself, of course–Hilton did this clever video spoof for the Funny or Die comedy Web site.
Now that he’s officially–well, Yahoo has not said so, but it is so–leaving the company this later summer, what say we blame Brad Garlinghouse for all the woes of Yahoo!
After all, Garlinghouse’s infamous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” was the key Ur-moment that one could point to as the one in which the curtains were pulled back at the troubled Internet company to reveal, well, a very sticky mess.
The 2006 internal document, penned by the Yahoo senior vice president, essentially unfairly impugned delicious peanut butter by using it as a metaphor for Yahoo spreading its resources too thinly.
So, as a memorial to the Garlinghouse era, BoomTown decodes the manifesto.
Hopefully, we will find out this morning the 411 on the Microsoft’s (MSFT) latest parry in its attempted takeover of Yahoo (YHOO).
But, before that, let me get this straight: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer now wants to go hostile on Yahoo with a proxy fight.
Because earlier this week, he sent smoke signals that he was considering [...]
Ah, more pointless eye candy from BoomTown’s good friends at Facebook!
Not satisfied to just entertain the masses with inane Vampires and SuperPokes, the social-networking site unleashed Lexicon on users this week.
It’s kind of like Google Zeitgeist except… well, it is exactly the same concept, all part of Facebook’s admiration of Google (GOOG) things, like, [...]
Here’s a snippet from Britney Spears’s upcoming cameo appearance on CBS’s (CBS) “How I Met Your Mother” sitcom next Monday, clips that are fast becoming among the most popular racing around the Web of late.
No longer a “popwreck,” as the TMZ (TWX) celebrity site calls her so lovingly, her first words on the show are: [...]
What, oh what, can we say about the latest inane quote from yet another Hollywood mogul about Apple’s Steve Jobs and his hugely popular iTunes and iPod products.
The latest piece of hoo-ha comes from former Disney CEO Michael Eisner (pictured below), pointing a finger at Apple as the real villain in the ongoing strike between [...]
Kara Swisher started covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1997 and also wrote the BoomTown column about the sector. With Walt Mossberg, she co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech and media conference.
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
D is unlike any other executive conference. Since its debut in 2003, D has brought to life the energy and excitement of the digital revolution in an unscripted, upfront and unparalleled way. Read more »
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