This past weekend, BoomTown revved up the Mini and headed out in the pouring rain to a Peet’s 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, semiannual 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 in the fall, with Marshall working alongside until he takes over fully in 2010.

(Shipley will remain on the advisory board, but will mostly be focusing on her consulting firm, Guidewire Group. She has run Demo for 13 years.)

Shipley and Marshall talked about it all in a video interview, as well as the fake controversy ginned up last year by champion ginner-upper TechCrunch–which, big surprise, runs a competing conference–about Demo’s longtime (and transparent) practice of charging a large fee to presenters.

“It was a false argument created as a marketing tool by a competitor,” said Shipley flatly.

What will be more pertinent and interesting in the Marshall era will be the integration between his VentureBeat Web site and the IDG-owned Demo conference, which could be a good way to take the conference and make it a year-round community of interest.

“We want to turn from a five-day affair into an ongoing conversation 365 days a year,” said Marshall, who also said the Demo model still works well. “It’s not that broken, so we will be tweaking it more than fixing it.”

Here’s the video of the pair chit-chatting about it all (sorry about the coffeeshop noise, but it was very festive):

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.”

This time, more rumors surfaced yesterday in Gizmodo, curiously, a week before the Macworld at which he is famously not appearing. The site used a single–yes, that’s right–source saying his illness and not Apple’s business troubles with the conference’s organizer, IDG, was the reason for his pull-out.

The rumor, of course, sent Apple (AAPL) shares into a tailspin for the day, before others–such as CNBC’s Jim Goldman–posted just-as-strong refutations of the Jobs-Is-On-His-Last-Legs stories.

Blogger Robert Scoble even talked to a worker at a yogurt store that Jobs frequents and got a health report (good!).

Oh, dear–yogurt workers as medical experts? What’s next? Brain surgery consultation from the Starbucks barista? This is what we’ve descended to?

It has to stop, because the fact of the matter is that Jobs’s health is still nobody’s business, as it has not been throughout this bizarre obsession with one man’s personal issues.

In a post in late July, the last time this issue surged, I wrote:

And after listening to all of the debate about it–mostly indignant declarations by the media, making their case mostly by wheedling milder indignant declarations from stock analysts and corporate tsk-tsk outfits–I have concluded that what is ailing Jobs is exactly no one’s business.

Even if his every breath is critical to the ongoing operations of Apple, the reason most use as their main argument for Jobs to tell all, it goes double.

Why?

Well, any Apple investor has to know by now that Jobs suffered from a rather serious bout with a curable version of pancreatic cancer some years ago and that recovery includes inevitable complications.”

And, indeed, the only decent argument you can make to focus so intently on Jobs’s health of any relevance is the impact on Apple company stock, which is self-righteously trotted out each time these specious reports emerge.

The thing is, a lot of companies have been run by execs with health issues (and countries too–VP Dick Cheney’s ticker has been misfiring for a long time now, for example, and he still seems to have been running the show with a verve we wish he perhaps did not have so much of now).

But, to be fair, I will acknowledge the issue. But if anyone does not get that Apple’s CEO has health issues by now, they are ignorant in the extreme. The situation should be baked into the stock price.

In addition, Apple is run by a lot of other competent people besides Jobs and they too are part of its success. Here’s a news flash–Steve Jobs does not conceive, manufacture and wrap every iPhone and iPod.

That is the kind of mythology that has, of course, been propagated a lot by Apple and it is–like a lot of things–a bit true in a bigger concept.

But, as I recently said, when Jobs inevitably leaves the company, probably on his own two feet in retirement, the Cupertino HQ will not suddenly be taken up to the skies as if it were the rapture.

Maybe the yogurt shop guy knows about when that’s going to happen.

Speaking of rapture, here’s singer Jill Sobule singing about that at a recent D: All Things Digital conference.

And, in a second video, she sings perfectly about how we should behave when it comes to what is inevitable for us all. People riveted by Jobs’s fate might do well to take her sage advice.

Here are the videos:

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:

1. Send the legions of Apple (APPL) fanboys–whose attendance at the January event has been akin to those who flock to sightings of the Virgin Mary in various places like, um, toast–into a deep chasm of depression from which they will never recover.

2. Renew rampant and unsubstantiated speculation about the health of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, which will immediately impact the stock of the tech icon. In fact, Apple shares are already down almost six percent in after-hours trading.

3. Begin rampant and unsubstantiated speculation about a power struggle within Apple among the potential successors to Jobs, including product czar Phil Schiller–who is giving the keynote–and COO Tim Cook. This utterly ignores the fact that you actually need more than one person to run a major corporation, even with His Digital Holiness in charge.

4. Result in a series of spurious reports of what cool new product the company will and will not release at the event, reports that BoomTown has calculated on my handy-dandy abacus are typically 83 percent wrong. Incredibly, the company always seems about to release something, because I seem to keep buying.

5. As Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski noted in a tweet just now: “Man, they must be chugging Mylanta by the gallon over at IDG corporate right now.”

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 got a lot of attention in 2007, after he stood his ground over editorial meddling by former CEO Colin Crawford, who tried to kill a “Ten Things We Hate About Apple” story.

McCracken quit, but was soon back on the job at the IDG unit, with Crawford kicked upstairs to corporate.

But, within a year, McCracken had left again, this time to strike out on his own at his Technologizer site, which is owned and operated by him (and using Federated Media to sell ads). It covers a wide range of tech topics, from PCs to smartphones to the future of cloud computing.

I like the tone of Technologizer, which also uses freelancers to supplement McCracken’s daily posts, a lot.

But what I like better still 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.

In addition, McCracken is a very nice guy, as you will see from this video, where we discuss a range of things (and yes, PC Word-style, I get him to make a list of key tech issues too).

Here’s the video: