A few weeks ago, BoomTown had lunch at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus in Mountain View with Dan’l Lewin, the software giant’s corporate VP for strategic and emerging business development.

In other words, Microsoft’s friendly face in the Valley, in charge of its operations there, which has about 2,000 employees.

Most of them work for other Microsoft (MSFT) divisions, leaving Lewin primarily responsible for the company’s relationships with start-ups, venture capitalists and industry partners.

It has, for example, relationships with Web 2.0 players like Digg and Facebook of late (pricey friendships, but friendly nonetheless). And it bought Tellme several years ago.

But Microsoft is not much of a big acquirer and has long been portrayed as Silicon Valley’s nemesis.

But times change and that image has been slowly shifting as its hammerlock of power has lessened with the surge of important players like Google (GOOG).

Lewin attributes that to more predictability from Microsoft (translation: not coming down like the Visigoths and pummeling folks without warning).

Unlike many Microsoft execs, Lewin has worked all around the tech industry, including at Apple (AAPL), NeXT Inc. and GO.

Here’s my chat with Lewin, where we talked about all that and more:

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.

U.S. speakers include TED’s Chris Anderson, News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace’s Amit Kapur, Marissa Mayer of Google (GOOG), Linda Avey of 23andMe, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft (MSFT).

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.

Of course, there’s a passel of bloggers here like BoomTown. I’ll be interviewing Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon (AMZN) and well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.

Besides this conference, Loïc Le Meur has been trying to make a go of it with his San Francisco-based start-up Seesmic, which–like a lot of Web 2.0 companies–has recently made cutbacks. See my video interview below with him in better times, when I visited Seesmic in February.

You can also watch the conference streamed live from its site. More shaky–but Frenchtastic, although no lip-synching extravaganzas for me!–videos from me at Le Web to come, of course.

[Full disclosure: My partner, Google exec Megan Smith (you can read all about it here in detail), is judging a start-up competition at Le Web on Wednesday. But I am trying to find an excuse not to go to that panel, because I always nod off at those things, even if the crazy version of Britney Spears were a judge. Instead, I hopefully will be enjoying the lovely artwork at the Louvre right then.]

I blame post-election exhaustion for rendering me comatose after Tuesday, which is how this video I did at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week got stuck in my to-do-later pile.

(I did manage to get the MySpace Music party video up though, but that was because it was more fun!)

Well, it has since been fished out, including interviews with conference organizers John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, as well as Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt (who is apparently scared of me, which is just the way I like it) and Microsoft’s man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin.

The overall message of the Web 2.0 Summit: Batten down the hatches, except tech always rises to the surface like some kind of econalypse-fighting styrofoam.

Well, we will see about that particular miracle, but here is the video:

Last night, dressed in my kindergarten soccer-coach best (sneaks, sweats and athletic socks–glam!), I ventured over to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco to attend VentureBeat’s party in honor of the launch of its new digital media blog.

Held at the Ambassador club on Geary Street, it was as if 1999 had never ended, and the huge crowd was partying like it was, well, 1999.

Shoulder to shoulder–or, in my puny case, shoulder to stomach–entrepreneurs, PR folks and a healthy smattering of press jammed into the venue, chattering about valuations, venture deals and other vacuous topics of Web 2.0.

Attendees included Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, Craigslist’s Jim Buckmaster, blogger Dan Gillmor and Microsoft-man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin (who gave us bupkis info about the deal, as you can see in the video).

Also in the video, in order, Meebo Co-Founder Seth Sternberg (fresh from a big funding); VentureBeat’s new editor of its digital media blog, Eric Eldon; Lewin; Gillmor; Valleywag’s Owen Thomas; and, finally, VentureBeat Editor and Founder Matt Marshall.

Nonetheless, here are two for the price of one (and, by price, we mean free) for your techie enjoyment.

Last month, Om Malik and his co-host, Joyce Kim, interviewed a bunch of folks while attending the TechCrunch40 conference, including the tracksuit-wearing, shaved-head-sporting Marc Andreessen (don’t get us wrong, we like the look). Also, extreme wonkery with Engadget guys and Chris Anderson of Wired on his book-worthy newest theory.

Then, it’s onto Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s go-to guy in Silicon Valley.

I have always thought Lewin was quite a charmer comparatively speaking (to most at Microsoft, that is, and not bad in general).

Watch carefully, as he is working as hard as he can to brush off the GoogleFacebookYouTube mindshare monster. Also, Lewin says exactly zero about Microsoft’s intentions toward Facebook.

Is it just me or does it seem exactly one million years ago when Microsoft was considered the scary Bigfoot?