John Battelle, the founder, chairman and CEO of Federated Media Publishing, told his staff this morning that he will begin a search for a new top exec to take the company into its next stage of growth.

In a post on the FM Web site, Battelle said that he was not leaving the San Francisco-based company and wrote that the new exec–whose title could be CEO–would report to him.

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Last week, I went to the 15th Stanford Accel Symposium, hosted by Stanford University’s MediaX and the VC firm Accel Partners.

With the honking big title of “The Delta Conference: The Impact of 2008 Dramatic Events on the World of Digital Media and Technology,” it included a panel on online media with a stellar gang, all talking about microblogging, content and where it is all going in this economic environment.

It was kind of like “The View,” except all guys in khakis and oxford shirts. You know, a typical Silicon Valley gathering.

Here are video interviews with the panelists.

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Here’s the video of Web 2.0 Summit host John Battelle interviewing Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg a few weeks ago, in which Battelle floated a rumor that the social-networking site might be interested in buying Twitter.

If you want to see the exchange, it starts at 22:15 minutes, when Battelle asks: “Is Twitter just a feature of Facebook?”

Awkwardness ensues from there until 23:07 minutes, with no direct question about an actual acquisition effort asked–getting Zuckerberg out of fibbing, since talks between the pair were then going on.

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I blame post-election exhaustion for rendering me comatose after Tuesday, which is how this video I did at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week got stuck in my to-do-later pile.

Well, it has since been fished out, including interviews with conference organizers, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, as well as Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt (who is apparently scared of me, which is just the way I like it) and Microsoft’s man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin.

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On Wednesday, the annual Web 2.0 Summit kicks off in San Francisco.

The lineup is particularly good this year and it is also a perfect time to take the temperature of the Internet’s movers and shakers, given all the hubbub of late with the weak economy.

Speakers will include bicycle champ Lance Armstrong, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, former VP Al Gore, Google.org head Larry Brilliant, Paul Otellini of Intel and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others.

But, best of all for BoomTown, singer Lionel Richie will be performing at a MySpace Music party.

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Did I wangle a seat right next to soon-to-be Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch last night at the Web 2.0 Summit dinner?
Of course I did, continuing in the shameless BoomTown tradition of trying to get gratis meals with moguls (like our ongoing efforts to raise money for DonorsChoose.org and get a free lunch with Yahoo [...]

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Our very own Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski–he of the arched eyebrow–did such a good job live-blogging our own fifth D: All Things Digital conference this year that we thought we would step up our game and send him out and about more often.

First stop, Apple’s special event today, starting at 10 a.m. PDT, at [...]

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Is there a trend in my post yesterday about the deal former Hollywood execs Lloyd Braun and Gail Berman struck with Pepsi to make original online content that the entertainment and marketing arm of the beverage giant will have a chance to fund and sponsor?

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I went to a dinner last night hosted by John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 Summit, and it was one of the more schmoozy events I have been to in a while.
The event–this year at Foreign Cinema in the Mission District of San Francisco–is held to elicit feedback from the Internet’s movers [...]

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