This past weekend, BoomTown revved up the Mini and headed out in the pouring rain to a Peets Coffee in Fremont, Calif., to the exact spot where Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley proposed that VentureBeat founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall take over the longtime bi-annual conference where several dozen start-ups strut their stuff in front of an industry crowd.

Shipley will still be running the show at Demo09, starting Sunday in Palm Desert, as well as the next Demo this fall, with Marshall working alongside until he takes over fully in 2010.

Here’s a video of the pair talking about the changeover.

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Now, it’s getting flat-out macabre.

That would be the continuing swirl of attention the health of Apple icon Steve Jobs has been getting.

Rumors of his impending demise have been popping up periodically since the too-thin crisis of the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and look like they won’t stop until it actually comes true.

My grandmother used to have a perfect rejoinder for this kind of funeral-chasing behavior, which was prevalent among her gang of Italian sisters, who–whenever anyone caught a cold–predicted the worst outcome: “Don’t be a crepe-hanger.”

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The prospect of no Steve Jobs keynote and Apple’s last year at IDG’s annual Macworld Conference & Expo is sure to do five things, none of which are pretty. An era is surely over, but what comes next is anyone’s guess.

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Yesterday, BoomTown had a much-belated lunch with longtime tech editor and writer Harry McCracken to catch up on how life has been going since he started his own tech blog site, Technologizer, this past summer.

The former editor-in-chief of PC World runs the blog, which is owned and operated by him, covering a wide range of tech topics, from PCs to smartphones to the future of cloud computing.

What I like about Technologizer and which I hope to see even more of in the tech blogosphere at large is the obvious respect McCracken has for accurate reporting, strong journalism standards and also trenchant analysis that actually gives a reader insight into a story.

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