BoomTown is now right next to a canal–no falling cows in sight!–in Amsterdam, here for an unusual digital conference called PICNIC, which starts Wednesday and runs through Friday.

With sessions like “We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity,” “The Emerging Real-Time Social Web” and “The Future of Business Creation,” it seems to be a place for big, messy Web ideas.

Speakers from the U.S. include former Microsoftie Linda Stone, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and Internet thinker and author Clay Shirky.

For PICNIC’s conference onstage, I will be interviewing Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries on the future of television, and the CEO of Vodaphone Netherlands, Guy Laurence, on the future of mobile.

But I am a little worried, after seeing this promo video for the conference, that it is a little too brainy for me (Warning to those who don’t like seeing heads exploding in a bloody mess!):

When I was in Munich, I ran into well-known Web pundit, teacher and consultant Clay Shirky (pictured here), who was on the “Exploding Media” panel at Hubert Burda Media’s DLD–Digital, Life, Design–conference held there this week.

So I used the opportunity to talk to the always thoughtful Shirky about his new book, called “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” which is set to come out in about a month from Penguin Press.

I have not read the book yet, but it should be another that seeks to figure out what impact digital technologies are having on society. It is described as “how the wildfire-like spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects–for good and for ill.”

That sounds about right, but let’s let Shirky explain in this video:

I have no idea, nor do I know why Burda broke out into song either–how much do you have to love a media mogul willing to do that?

But I got it all on video and a whole lot more on the last day of the pre-Davos European gathering focused on digital issues and innovation.

(And here is a post by European serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, who apparently thinks his video shows that Accel Partners’ Simon Levene and I were not impressed enough by Campbell.)

In any case, DLD’s motto was: “Uploading the 21st Century.” And while it did not quite do that, there were definitely a lot of interesting moments I captured for your viewing pleasure.

Along with Campbell (who was supposed to appear on a panel on Africa, but did not) and a singing Burda, the video features clips from two sessions today.

The first was titled “Exploding Media” and included: pundit Clay Shirky riffing on flash mobs; a very funny clip of kids talking about television (made by Technorati’s Peter Hirshberg); Google’s Marissa Mayer noting that Google will still not be in the content business; Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz discussing Yahoo’s plans to de-focus on making original content; and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis advising old media to just ask WWGD? (What would Google do?).

Another session on the video features the founders of the genetics-focused social-networking company 23andMe–Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Esther Dyson–answering questions about fears people have about learning too much about DNA.

Here is the video (and now I am off to Hamburg to visit Xing, a business social-networking company):