Last Friday, National Public Radio top execs came to San Francisco for a “Digital Think In” to pick the brains of some Silicon Valley types about where the public radio icon should go, digitally speaking.

While NPR actually has been pretty fast-forward with podcasts and a robust Web site, it still has to think about what social networking means to it and whether a day is coming when broadcasting online will be bigger than offline.

Also, what’s up with Twitter?

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As the final posting of the onstage interviews at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, here is one of the sessions that generated a lot of news: The first major interview about the Palm Pre with Elevation Managing Director Roger McNamee and Palm Chairman and CEO Jon Rubinstein.

The pair are trying to remake Palm in a bet-the-company move to recover the Silicon Valley icon’s long-lost glory via innovation.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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BoomTown did a video interview with Palm’s sugar daddy investor Roger McNamee at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, after the debut of its Pre smartphone.

Via Elevation Partners, McNamee has invested a total of $425 million in Palm, aimed at reviving the company that pioneered the smartphone market, but lost its step to competitors.

Thus, Palm and the private equity firm have banked a lot on its new product, so McNamee was out in full force at CES in Las Vegas, talking up the Pre.

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How often does a brother-in-law get the credit?

But when it comes to top Google exec Sheryl Sandberg taking over as COO at Facebook, apparently a very influential person in the move was Marc Bodnick.

While Bodnick’s Elevation Partners colleague Roger McNamee–both are named on its site as managing directors and co-founders of the private equity firm–has been cited correctly as being key to hooking up Sandberg with Facebook CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg, Sandberg noted that Bodnick’s enthusiasm was critically infectious.

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So, in getting back into the swing of things, I have been paying visits to various and sundry players around the Web industry, and there’s probably no better place to land than in the offices of Roger McNamee, a voluble longtime investor in the sector.
His newest private equity investment firm, Elevation Partners, has $1.9 [...]

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