Oh, Scooby-Don’t…

You could not be more wrong in your post last week–titled, “Why Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are wrong about naming Web 3.0 ‘Web 3.0′”–about Walt and I being wrong about naming Web 3.0 “Web 3.0″ in an essay we posted at the start of our D: All Things Digital conference, which took place last week.

I know writing “Kara Swisher,” “Walt Mossberg” and “Wrong” is well-nigh irresistible, but your solution of calling the digital era we are in the “2010 Web” is equally confusing and incorrect.

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Last night, BoomTown was at the Horn Group offices in San Francisco to appear on a lively panel called “Is Social Media Killing PR?”

Focused on the “future of the media ecosystem,” it was inspired by recent blog rants by Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, all of whom have taken potshots at the PR industry as unnecessary or broken in the new social media order.

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Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

The message: They will survive! (Cue the disco ball.)

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Here’s a video of star VC John Doerr reciting his 10 tips for start-ups to follow in the economic downturn, dispensed at a VentureBeat roundtable event on the downturn yesterday.

And the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers VC didn’t need a massive, noisy PowerPoint like Sequoia Capital to make his quick and clear points, which he delivered in four minutes flat.

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Tomorrow, BoomTown is trying to find a silver lining from a group of entrepreneurs at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” roundtable event.

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic will join Max Levchin of Slide, Jason Calacanis of Mahalo, O’Melveny & Myers’ Sam Zucker, and Nirav Tolia of Web 1.0’s Epinions.

Along with my group, for whom I am planning all sorts of verbal tortures (”Exactly how much do you make?”), there is also a star-studded investors panel.

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As usual, colorful serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis makes lemonade from lemons–or is it vice versa?–touting cost-cutting at his human-powered search engine start-up and newest venture, Mahalo, almost as much as he touted its prospects when he started it up a year ago with $20 million in funding.

But in a blog post yesterday, Calacanis sang perfectly in tune with the new, decidedly grimmer, times. But BoomTown has videos of when things were sunnier for Mahalo.

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Earlier today, BoomTown broke the stunning-for-blogs news that ContentNext, owner of the popular online digital media news site paidContent, was being bought by the Guardian Media Group for about $30 million in an earn-out acquisition.

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

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Yesterday, I traveled to Los Angeles for paidContent’s second Economics of Social Media conference, which opened last night and is being held all day today at the Skirball Cultural Center.
This morning, I am interviewing Steve Wadsworth, who helms Walt Disney’s (DIS) Internet businesses.
And after sating myself with as much Club Penguin info as possible, I [...]

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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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Here’s a video I did about the first day of DLD–Digital, Life, Design–put on my Hubert Burda Media in Munich this week.
The three-day conference focuses on digital innovation, science and culture. It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.
I was here to [...]

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While we at D: All Things Digital don’t style ourselves as peacemakers, one of the genuine sateen pillows that we had tossed blithely about our party in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday night seemed to have a dulcet effect on bringing together faux foes.
Pictured below is Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis and [...]

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Our John Paczkowski of Digital Daily continued to brave the potential for falling ill from start-up fatigue from his hysterically funny live-blogging of Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, while BoomTown continued to wander the halls in search of snacks and a safe haven from PR minions.
To no avail, although we did have a [...]

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While we subjected our stalwart John Paczkowski of Digital Daily to the onerous and potentially mind-numbing task of live-blogging Jason Calacanis’s and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference, BoomTown broke some news (on the Yahoo-Zimbra $350 million deal), wandered around and basically schmoozed.
In addition, cupcakes were had.
(The day also included a pricey payback lunch for a bet [...]

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In the age of algorithms, is there any use for a human-powered search engine?
Serial entrepreneur Jason Calacanis thinks so and tried to make the case for his new company Mahalo onstage at D5, where the service was launched.
By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and [...]

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So I paid a visit to Jason Calacanis’s newest venture, Mahalo, in its nondescript warehouse office on the outskirts of downtown Santa Monica, Calif., on Friday.
We demoed the manic entrepreneur’s latest company, the “human-powered” search engine, at D5 this year. The venture was funded by–among others–Sequoia Capital and its wunderkind VC Roelof Botha.
The colorful [...]

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