BoomTown is not saying it’s going to be like watching grass grow.

But 2009 is not exactly getting off to a rousing start this week–with a pair of definitely underwhelming blockbuster tech events taking place that already have more of an air of whimper than of bang to them.

That would be the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual egregious gadgetfest in Las Vegas, and the final appearance by Apple (AAPL) at Macworld in San Francisco.

Of course, while CES tries to fend off the spate of no-one-is-going-to-CES stories–well, I am!–the absence of his digital Holiness and Apple CEO Steve Jobs at Macworld has really generated most of the glumness.

[UPDATE: In a public letter, Jobs says he has a "hormone imbalance" and will stay on as CEO as he recovers.]

Still, the keynote cancellation by Jobs–which started off a new round of is-he-sicker? rumors–is profoundly depressing for Macworld.

After all, it was only two years ago that he practically blew out every geek mind with the introduction of the iPhone there. (See a part of that masterful performance in a video below.)

Thus, it falls to Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing, Phil Schiller, to be thrilling–with exactly what, it is still unclear. Rumors abound, none of which are very promising (New iLife and iWork! New Mac mini! Zzzzzzzz).

There is, of course, the vain hope that Schiller will end his speech by uttering Jobs’s patented “one more thing” line, wherein Jobs will walk out (without a walker!), wave and create what would be a genuine frenzy, especially since the last sighting of him was at a yogurt store.

As to CES, there is no big or new product trend to point to, except rumor of a possibly exciting intro of a touchscreen smartphone from Palm (PALM) with a slide-down keyboard. Wheeeee!

Some keynote speakers include Sony (SNE) CEO Sir Howard Stringer, Ford Motor Co. (F) CEO Alan Mulally, Intel (INTC) Chairman Craig Barrett and Cisco (CSCO) CEO John Chambers.

Interestingly, the absence of former Microsoft (MSFT) head Bill Gates at CES–long announced, after more than a dozen times there–caused no weeping and rending of garments, as did Jobs’s nonappearance.

In his place, there will be a keynote by the software giant’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, in which no major announcement seems to be coming.

Still, one can dream, and I desperately hope Ballmer will say “one more thing” and out will come Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang to announce a big honking search deal, finally putting to bed one of 2008’s longest-running soap operas.

What can I say? This is tech and, for us (okay, me, at least), that would be exciting.

Speaking of gripping, I dare you to watch this 2007 iPhone intro performance by Apple’s Jobs and not be deeply impressed by his stylings:

In advance of tomorrow’s elections, here’s a pair of videos of the two presidential candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain and Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, talking about tech.

While Obama has many more supporters in the tech and Internet sectors in terms of numbers, including Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt, McCain’s include Cisco (CSCO) CEO John Chambers, former eBay (EBAY) CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard (HP) head Carly Fiorina.

And while tech is not exactly issue No. 1 with either of them, here is McCain talking about it in the entire interview he did at the fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007 (he also discusses Iraq and other topics in the interview) and a new, much shorter three-minute video just posted by Obama on tech policy:

With a number of consumer-facing acquisitions of late and the Web 2.0 buzzword on his lips, we talked about a range of things for the tech company, from social networking to online video to cable boxes.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay and many others.

And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski live-blogged D5, and we also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.

Here’s Chambers:

Here is that video from MarketWatch about the joint interview PBS’s Charlie Rose did with John Chambers of Cisco and Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, where they trotted out that old saw about coopetition.

In other words, how the tech giants might compete, but also interoperate for customers’ sake. Let’s say we keep this one near the top of the pile, just in case it turns out differently.

“The Newspaper Is Dead. Long Live the Newspaper.”

That’s a nice kicker at the end of an excellent essay on the shift in newspaper reading from Slate’s Jack Shafer (full disclosure–I once worked for him when I was but a wee lass).

Shafer’s not saying much new here: Guess what? People are increasingly getting their news on the Web and they like it that way!

But, as usual, he says it well:

Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.

“I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today.”

And he has some good suggestions for the troublesome trend, too: more succinct stories; better use of graphics on heftier inside pages; and, of course, acceptance of inevitable change.

I would add: Pray fervently that the trend is not moving quite as fast as it actually is.

Go Ahead and Use That SUV and Feel Better–Not

OK, I will admit I have been somewhat dubious about these carbon-offset credits you can buy to balance out your energy consumption.

Now, I am even more disturbed after seeing this video about the topic, given that Michel Gelobter of the think tank Redefining Progress and founder of Climatecooler.com says some companies that can cause increased global warming are being planned, so we can pay them not to be created.

In the meantime, also read Valleywag Owen Thomas’s entirely on-point screed about the global warmingness of the techie-heavy Burning Man event, now taking place in the Nevada desert.

Confused?

Here’s the video:

Now, in living color, the entire historic joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple.

D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players.

That has included Gates and Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, today, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

We’ve done this early with our popular interview with Gates and Jobs for download on iTunes (where it is among the most popular video podcasts ever for download), as well Walt’s solo interview with Jobs and Schmidt on this site.

Now, everyday, I am going to highlight a different interview from the conference. And, today, I obviously must kick off with the interview that attracted the most attention: our joint discussion with Gates and Jobs.

There is not much to say about it that has not been said. It’s 83 minutes. It’s historic. It’s funny. It is visionary (and not the cat fight expected between the longtime rivals). It’s surprisingly poignant in parts.

Here you are:

Starting Monday, we’ll be posting all of the interviews from D5 in their entirety. I will be posting and commenting on each interview here in this blog, but the videos will also reside in our video player.

While we have already posted the joint interview of Microsoft’s Bill Gates-Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as a solo turn by Jobs and also one with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now you can watch lively discussions with film legend George Lucas, YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, CBS CEO Les Moonves, Viacom chief Philippe Dauman and many more, as well as seeing our demos and other special video.

And you had no idea what you were going to watch in the midst of the summer doldrums. Now, let Cisco’s John Chambers liven up your day!

I stopped into the iMeme: The Thinkers of Tech conference, put on by Fortune magazine yesterday and today in San Francisco, and ran into a passel of the Internet regulars, talking about–you guessed it–the Internet.

You got your John Chambers of Cisco, you got your Sheryl Sandberg of Google, you got your Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, you got your Jeff Weiner of Yahoo–and you’ve got yourself a digital partay.

A lot of people were blabbing about the latest bubble rumor that Microsoft was considering offering $6 billion to purchase Facebook. Yes, the No. 2 (by far) social-networking company that could, making the definitive leader MySpace worth, like, a kabillion.

Here is my little video of the event, as I chat with conference organizer David Kirkpatrick and Fortune magazine editor Andy Serwer (with whom I went to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where we both did precisely nothing).

I also play a little word association–$6 billion, being the key one–with Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi and the obviously-weary-of-me Facebook PR maven Brandee Barker.

Volpi knows the founders of the online video service, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, as he has served on the board of their last hit, Skype.

Before he left, Volpi was in line to run Cisco, which is now under the leadership of CEO John Chambers. But as the ebullient Chambers told me in an interview onstage at D last week, he was not planning any move from the tech giant anytime soon (not even for an offer made onstage by Sen. John McCain at the conference to serve in the cabinet if he won his presidential bid).

The company needs a tech-savvy CEO, and one familiar with Silicon Valley, given that it recently got a $45 million boost of cash from a group of big venture firms and media companies, as I wrote here, including Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, as well as CBS.

While a lot of Joost’s success rests on getting a lot of great content for its service to deliver quality video content on the Web, how well it works and how easy it is to use (not so easy in my beta tests, so far) will be key to its success. And also how it works with all its multiple partners.

In that vein, Volpi is a good choice. Though his last Cisco title sounded geekish–SVP of Routing and Service Provider Technology Group–he was deeply involved in all of the company’s wheeling and dealing, including its aggressive acquisition sprees.

He was born in Italy, lived in Japan, attended Stanford University and also worked at Hewlett-Packard, so he is also perhaps a perfect balance of international and local (tech-wise) for the internationally based Joost.

Interestingly, sources told me that Volpi also talked to Yahoo about running its Audience Group.

And that’s without what was clearly the blockbuster joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of Apple, which got a mountain of attention, as it deserves for both its historic implications (the two icons of tech in a rare analog appearance together) and its sheer drama (PC guy meets Mac guy, except in real life!).

While it was not the WrestleMania some would have preferred, I thought it was riveting to see two people with very little left to prove about anything in their professional careers and who will be in the history books willing to go out on a bit of a limb and talk from a more personal place.

In addition, watching these longtime rivals and also collaborators kibitz about their tech-war stories, each correcting the other’s memories, was really interesting. Here is a great comic strip from the Joy of Tech Web site about the interview that says it all.

But outside of the glare of the pairing, there were a lot of highlights and insights I gleaned from the other onstage interviews.

1. THE MSM FINALLY GETS IT: One of the things that struck me was how comfortable and easygoing all the traditional media executives interviewed were. CBS’s Les Moonves, Peter Chernin of News Corp., Ann Moore of Time Inc. and even suing-Google-for-a-billion Philippe Dauman of Viacom all seemed less fearful of the Web than ready and eager to use it for their benefit.

Of course, there are copyright issues for all, which was articulately explained by Dauman (who came off as reasonable in his case against Google’s YouTube), but all seemed to understand the need to find new business models and new distribution methods for their content.

They also had the funniest videos–here is Moore’s faux Geico ad with actor Mario Cantone and Viacom’s genius Stephen Colbert monologue.

2. DANCING WITH THE TECH STARS: On the flip side of that, both Google’s Eric Schmidt and YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen need to at least be a bit more respectful in public about other peoples’ work and rights. It cannot and will not be, as much as I love the idea of empowerment of the consumer, just the “community” that decides what is OK to post.

And, as smart as they might be, it’s hard to rely simply on their assurances that their brainiac engineers will come up with a way soon to stop copyright theft. This is a delicate dance that Google must pull off without two left–and arrogant–feet.

Still, YouTube’s intro video was very sweet, especially Chen and Hurley scarfing donuts.

3. GEORGE LUCAS IS NOT SHY: While the legendary filmmaker has always been known as shy, Lucas had not even dropped his bags on the floor of the hotel lobby before he was deep in conversation and debate about the digital sector with a plethora of folks gathered round.

And he did not mind being pugnacious either, telling YouTube’s Hurley and Chen that they should endow a film school to make up for all the crappy video they had unleashed on the world.

Onstage, Lucas, no lover of Hollywood’s machinations either, gave a great label to some video on the Web, which he called “circus,” or, better still, “throwing puppies on a highway,” compared to “art” that endures.

4. SEN. JOHN MCCAIN IS ALSO NOT SHY: About sticking to his guns, so to speak, related to his stance to continue fighting in Iraq and also about the risks posed by the spread, if we withdraw too early, of Islamic Jihadism.

But Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Cisco’s John Chambers do look the part of cabinet members here. What about Steve Case, whose new businesses center around health, as surgeon general? Or Charles Simonyi, former Microsoft exec and recent space traveler, for head of NASA?

But, whatever your view about the war, I think we can all respectfully disagree with Sen. McCain’s contention that cellphone service in the U.S. is top-notch. Clearly, he has never been to the black hole of mobile coverage near Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road lately.

So here’s one of my movies to show you how we prepare for the annual conference, which is highlighted this year by a joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, the twin icons of the tech industry.

We’ll kick off the conference tomorrow night with an interview with Sen. John McCain, who is in the race to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States. We will talk to him about that, as well as the war in Iraq, but also hope to discuss a plethora of digital issues with him. McCain is one of the few politicians who knows a thing or two about the media, telecom and Web sectors.

Other interviewees on Wednesday and Thursday include: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; CBS CEO Les Moonves; News Corp. President Peter Chernin; Cisco CEO John Chambers; former AOL CEO Steve Case, who will talk about his new company, Revolution; famed director and producer George Lucas; Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley; Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom; and space tourist (and former Microsoft exec) Charles Simonyi.

We’ll also have demos from tech players like Palm legend Jeff Hawkins and others. And we are also excited to have singer/songwriter Jill Sobule, who will perform several times throughout.

We’ll have full coverage of D5 on our site, starting tomorrow night, including liveblogging by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, pictures, video excerpts and more.

That makes a bit of sense, given that Chambers has been trying to reposition the image of a company that has been known more for its unsexy expertise in selling Internet innards to the corporate market (somehow, “infrastructure equipment maker” just does not roll off the tongue). Via a series of recent acquisitions of more consumer-facing companies like WebEx and Five Across, Cisco has been making aggressive moves of late with a focus on being a big player in home-entertainment networking gear (it also owns wireless router Linksys and cable set-top-box maker Scientific Atlanta).

Noting the boom in the consumer traffic on the Web, especially in high-speed video, and the development of all sorts of newfangled products like social-networking and other more interactive methods of communication, all of which fall under the tired-by-now Web 2.0 rubric, Chambers said, “I don’t think we are being overenthusiastic when we say this will drive the industry for the next decade.”

I am interviewing Chambers at the D: All Things Digital conference that Walt Mossberg and I host in a few weeks, and I am looking forward to all the new catchphrases from the affable executive. Now that he has Web 2.0 down, you know it’s just a short hop to Twitter.