On a recent visit to Los Angeles, BoomTown stopped in at the Santa Monica HQ of Docstoc, a start-up aimed at document-sharing online.

I have long been interested in the next paradigm for all sorts of publishing.

And Docstoc is certainly among the more innovative sites, letting users store, search and share business, legal and tech-related documents for free.

Here’s a video tour of the start-up.

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Microsoft’s earnings and revenue took a hit in its third quarter, as expected, with profits down 32 percent from a year ago on a six percent sales decline.

Before one-time charges, the software giant earned $2.98 billion, or 33 cents a share after one-time charges, on revenue of $13.65 billion.

The weak results were relatively in line with analysts’ estimates of 39 cents a share on $14.1 billion in revenue.

The culprit for the bad news was the decline in consumer and business spending on computers since half Microsoft’s operating income comes from sales of its Windows operating system.

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SiliconANGLE blogger John Furrier found a supersweet television ad that eBay Internet phone unit Skype is running to goose its brand.

The once-hottest-ever start-up–touted up and down Silicon Valley for its explosive growth back in 2003–is still a major global brand with a massive 405 million user accounts at the end of 2008.

In fact, Skype’s size makes media-overhyped Twitter seem, well, twee, by comparison. Twitter had only 9.8 million unique visitors in February, up impressively from 6.1 million in January.

But the hot-or-not comparisons between the two are interesting to think about.

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Well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur Reid Hoffman will become CEO of LinkedIn again, taking on the job he had for nearly four years after founding the business networking company in 2003. Hoffman replaces current CEO Dan Nye, who has resigned and will leave the company in mid-January. More interesting in the shift is the appointment of former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner as interim president, overseeing day-to-day operations at LinkedIn.

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The Huffington Post, co-founded by Arianna Huffington, will announce this morning that it has raised $25 million, in a single investment from Oak Investment Partners.

The large round, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blogging 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.

“I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site,” said Harman in an interview with BoomTown last night.

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Back in November, I did a video interview with LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye about the fast-growing, in-play business social network.

We talked about the future of LinkedIn and what it all means.

As BoomTown noted then, LinkedIn was the “‘professional’ social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook.”

But that more dour productivity image certainly did not prevent it from getting a very happy $1 billion valuation yesterday and $53 million in new funding.

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In a much-expected financing, LinkedIn has joined the big funding club (Slide, Spot Runner) of late, by raising $53 million at a startling $1 billion valuation.

Why go public when you can just pretend?

Actually, unlike a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups, the professional-networking site has been profitable since 2006.

The new slug of cash comes from new investor Bain Capital Ventures, along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Ventures.

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