Last week, an obviously jet lagged (and badly dressed, as some troglodyte commenters on Yahoo pointed out, but it was snowing!) BoomTown visited with Henry Blodget at Yahoo’s Tech Ticker studio in Times Square to talk about a range of digital topics.

The video interviews included: How well Apple will do without Steve Jobs on deck; whether blogging reporting and professionalism standards need to rise; when Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Time Warner online unit AOL will stop dancing around various deals; and, finally, how the recession is impacting Silicon Valley.

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Boomtown extends apologies to the late Francis P. Church, who penned the original “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” editorial in the New York Sun in 1897. But with a little rejiggering, his eloquent words work perfectly as a translation for Apple’s press release about its withdrawal from Macworld yesterday, which doubtlessly shook the Apple faithful to the core. Oddly enough, it matches up surprisingly–and a little disturbingly–well. Thus, here’s a little holiday inspiration to help those poor souls make it through these darkest of days.

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Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget sounds an important horn again, namely, outlining in graphically ugly detail why graphical advertising-based businesses online are in big trouble.

In his post, Blodget shows some convincing graphs about past performance trends, including the years after the first bubble burst, from 2000 to 2002, which could augur what is to come for the display business.

And it ain’t pretty.

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Today, BoomTown will be spending the whole day–complete with lunch!–at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ to visit various and sundry execs in charge of a wide range of products.

Why? Well, as interested as I am in all of Yahoo’s always messy corporate and stock machinations, it’s just as important to get a handle on exactly what actual products and services the company is working on to get out of its quandary.

Because, while Yahoo is still talking about merging with AOL, it needs to have other options.

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As has been copiously reported here and all over, Yahoo and AOL have been engaged in never-ending talks about a possible deal to merge their flagging Internet businesses.

Now, sources tell me, the circle of executives at both companies interfacing with each other has been widened, for purposes of due diligence.

That includes Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who is in New York this week–where AOL parent, Time Warner, is located–to meet once again with its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, to see if they can actually complete the merger.

Now, all this frantic activity does not mean a deal will necessarily be struck.

But it is just this kind of ramped-up blabbery that has many at both companies predicting that a deal will go through, sooner or later, as soon as Time Warner and Yahoo can agree on a price.

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Although we did not raid the offices of Silicon Alley Insider and “steal” Peter Kafka, as the fanciful SAI kingpin Henry Blodget alleges–had it been a raid, BoomTown would have properly hog-tied Blodget so he could not make such spurious allegations!–it is true that SAI’s current managing editor (pictured here) will be coming to work for us at AllThingD.com soon.

He will write a daily still-unnamed new media blog from New York City, starting at the end of October.

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Here is a post and also a video of me talking about the topic on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker last week with Henry Blodget and Aaron Task.
I also wrote about this issue–Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang’s chances in his proxy fight with activist investor Carl Icahn–in a post called, “Who Has Stolen the Old Jerry Yang? [...]

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With the sale of paidContent to the Guardian Media Group and the talks TechCrunch has been in with AOL, there certainly is a lot of hubbub around tech blogging sites of late.

One of the more interesting sites that has gone up over the last year has been Silicon Alley Insider, which is headlined by former Internet analyst Henry Blodget (yes, that Henry Blodget).

But perhaps most compelling is that the site is backed by Web 1.0 entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, former CEO of DoubleClick, who has nested SAI inside a networks of new Web efforts at AlleyCorp.

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The lack of announcement by Microsoft this morning, as expected, has Silicon Alley Insider speculating that Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) are finally engaged in serious, behind-the-scenes discussions about finally coming to the table and making a deal in the long-running takeover battle.
From Henry Blodget’s blog to Steve Ballmer’s brain…
But it’s not a bad theory, [...]

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So what prompted TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to pen a pugnacious piece on how blogs should not be raising so much venture capital and instead roll themselves into a “Dream Team,” with the unusual title of “More Bloggers Raising Money. Here Comes Politics. And Here Comes My Rant” yesterday?
Well, besides garnering Arrington a big dollop [...]

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Last year, Michael Dell returned to the computer company that he founded to try to get it back on track.
Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget and I talk about what it will take to get Dell (DELL) moving–innovation–in this video on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker.
Here’s the video:

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After six weeks of non-movement on Microsoft’s bold but unsolicited bid for Yahoo, it is still unclear what will happen. Most think Yahoo (YHOO) will eventually have to sell to Microsoft (MSFT) and it might eke out a slightly higher price.
Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget and I talk about the current situation on Yahoo’s Tech [...]

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Here is a video of me and Silicon Alley Insider’s Henry Blodget on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker, discussing the DNA of the Google (GOOG) founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the impact on the company’s recent stock meltdown.
Our diagnosis: Not crazy, but iconoclastic.
Here’s the video:

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I guess someday Microsoft will finally get around to buying Yahoo–as it has been doing, based on various reports, for the last few years now (talk about due diligence!).

But not today.
That has not stopped the speculation from flying all over the place–mostly due, I think, to the fact that no one can exactly figure out [...]

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News Corp. President and COO Peter Chernin made a funny last week in a video interview on FT.com.
At first, it was all business when Chernin said while he had a “healthy” level of respect and paranoia for Facebook–which is the hot-on-its-heels-second social network breathing down the neck of News Corp.-owned MySpace–that in most countries MySpace [...]

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