Well, here’s a good reason not to write off Joost quite yet:

When it officially debuts its new Web-based service in mid-October, the London-based company will have some pretty hot content with its half-dozen seasons of the former NBC hit, “Friends.”

Also, there will finally be no more irksome plug-ins.

There will also be cooler social-networking elements.

While all this is not going to make up for the lost time the online video service has wasted with its annoying P2P-based desktop client download, going to a Web-based, all-Flash service with more robust content is certainly the right way to stop rival service Hulu from continuing to clean Joost’s clock.

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Actually, although BoomTown is staying right around the corner from Buckingham Palace in Mayfair, I am in London on my way to the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam later this week, where I will be interviewing some digital leaders onstage.

We’re still working on rolling out a version of our D: All Things Digital conference in Europe next fall, so it’s important to get a sense of what is going on here in the digital sector and, of course, what is not.

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Recently, while I was at a conference in Los Angeles, I caught up with Veoh Founder Dmitry Shapiro.

BoomTown will be focusing a lot on online video this year and Veoh is one of the several online video sharing sites–a group of smaller players that includes sites like Joost, Hulu, Dailymotion, Vimeo and others that I like to call not-YouTube.

Still, it is making progress.

Today, the Los Angeles-based Veoh announced that the ABC television network would put full episodes of its hot primetime shows–such as “Ugly Betty” (love it) and “Desperate Housewives” (not so much)–up on the site.

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I just got to Park City, Utah, for my annual visit (well, this will be my third year here) to the famous film festival that takes place in this lovely mountain resort.
While I like a good movie as much as the next person, I am no film aficionado, nor do I have a screenplay stuffed [...]

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So when, if ever, will there be a truly bona fide Internet hit?
And please, pretty please, it just can’t be “lonelygirl15″ (pictured below) and some clever music videos.

The lack of lasting and profitable professional content online is once again in sharp relief with the writers’ strike now taking place in Hollywood.
In a Wall Street Journal [...]

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Here’s some more video from the halls of Web 2.0 Summit, which is taking place this week in San Francisco.
Look to John Paczkowski of Digital Daily for liveblogging from the conference yesterday, which included appearances by Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and eBay’s Meg Whitman.
Today is the final day, with digital bigshots onstage like: AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, [...]

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Joost, the online video service, is finally out of beta–kind of–with the release of its 1.0 software to anyone who cares to download it and a redesign of both its Web page and search on the service.

The broadband peer-to-peer Internet service, which is trying to popularize a television experience on the Web by providing professionally [...]

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I like Mike. Volpi, that is, Joost’s new CEO. The 40-year-old longtime tech exec is a nice choice to run the moderately hyped online video television site. But I will admit it–I have not been gung-ho on the prospect of Joost–which I have called a potentially “messy control freak of a service.”

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Here’s part 2 of my interview with Joost’s Mike Volpi.
See the first post and video about the online television video service here.
Also below, check out a video (and post here) I did earlier this summer from a party Joost hosted for Hollywood content creators at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Leonard H. Goldenson [...]

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I will be traveling south to Los Angeles Sunday afternoon to do a few days reporting there.
That will include visits to the offices of JibJab, Userplane, Disney’s Internet Group, as well as some catching up with newly minted investor Ross Levinsohn and Joost CEO Mike Volpi.
We’ll be headed that way again a week later to [...]

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Summer is officially over, kids, so back to school.

And no more Burning Man either (we completely ignored the annual techie Valhalla in his blog, because it evoked a very dusty and peyote feeling that we just have never felt the need to learn about close up and personal)!

In other words, time to get serious about the business at hand!

Namely, cranking the volume up to 11 on our ongoing efforts to figure out a few choice things about several different Internet companies.

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BoomTown has left our sojourn in Ireland with Walt Mossberg in our ongoing quest to create EuroD and has arrived in London.

For some reason, though, we have still not gotten our invite to Buckingham Palace to discuss the wireless access and show off the iPhone to the royals.
Nonetheless, we press ahead and will be out [...]

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I first ran into Sequoia venture capitalist Roelof Botha in the green room of our recent D5 conference, where he was there to see the demo being done by Jason Calacanis for Mahalo, a “human-powered” search service that Botha had recently invested in.

Though I jokingly congratulated Calacanis on the investment from a “toddler VC,” because of the 33-year-old Botha’s freshly-scrubbed and youthful looks, I’d be pretty pleased if my two sons–2 and 5 years old–could be involved in a multibillion deal after only a few years on the job.

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So yesterday in a very short post, I said the $1 billion valuation that NBC Universal and News Corp. were reportedly putting on its online video joint venture was, shall we say, premature.
Here’s why: No users, no track record and no revelations about what it is actually going to look like. Also no firm launch [...]

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Joost threw a party in North Hollywood (which is really closer to Burbank than Hollywood) Tuesday at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’s Leonard H. Goldenson Theatre for a small throng of Hollywood folks, most of whom looked to be about 21 years old collectively.

(You can just imagine a big Hollywood muckety-muck telling his [...]

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