For the past few months, the Huffington Post has been on a bit of a tear–both in terms of traffic gains and in its hiring of some big talent for key positions.

Now, those execs are focusing on using that consumer momentum to achieve what has eluded the Huffington Post thus far: Making some serious bank from the privately held news and media site.

Here’s a chat I had with new President and Chief Revenue Officer Greg Coleman about how he is aiming to do just that.

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BoomTown is clearly losing a step in the summer doldrums and forgot to post this lovely movie that I did while in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last weekend for an event called the “Internet Cowboys Un-Conference.”

What’s an un-conference? Well, it was less organized, there were fly-fishing and elk nearby and it involved a whole lot of thinking big thoughts in the much bigger outdoors.

It was actually a very bracing time and here is a video I did interviewing some of the participants.

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Of all the many journalists I admire, Walter Cronkite is perhaps right at the very top of the list.

With an unerring sense of fairness, consistent equilibrium that is sorely missed, rigorous adherence to ethics and standards and a crackerjack reporter, the legendary television newsman and iconic anchor–who died yesterday at 92 years old–was also never afraid to show his humanity.

In today’s very noisy media universe, he should serve as an example of how to be booming without being shrill, and commanding without being a blowhard.

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For all the noisy hubbub over should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish confidential documents hacked from password-protected accounts of Twitter employees, as well as a Twitter spouse, it is actually pretty simple.

Stolen equals stolen.

But, because this is a “hot” issue and it concerns an even hotter Web 2.0 company–Holy traffic-gooser, Batman!–the debate will surely go on and on, even as the stolen information inevitably leaks its way out.

Still, let’s not pretend what it is and is not.

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Apparently, if you want to think about the growth of the Huffington Post as a culinary dish, perhaps today’s replacement of CEO Betsy Morgan with longtime online media powerhouse Eric Hippeau might appear under the Emeril Lagasse cooking cliché: Let’s kick it up a notch!

Both co-founders of the online media site, Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer, said as much in interviews I did with them–as well as Hippeau–this afternoon.

“The deal is that we simply have been growing so fast that we needed more firepower to accelerate in expanding the site and monetizing it,” said Huffington, who is also editor-in-chief of the news site.

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Does the tech march ever slow down?

Not this week it doesn’t! And Digital Daily’s live-blogger de tutti live-bloggers John Paczkowski will be there to cover every move.

Today, in case you haven’t heard, is the big annual Apple event: The Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And, tomorrow brings a Google App confab.

Nutritional journalism information: We’ll be bringing it to you un-processed, but promise it will account of 100 percent of your daily accuracy value.

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Today, at the Silicom Summit at Stanford University, BoomTown was on a panel about consumer media, and right in a front seat paying rapt attention was Steve Wozniak.

It was the same Woz–the famous nickname of the Apple co-founder–who was also staring back last week at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference and taking it all in.

So, of course, I whipped out the Flip digital video camera and asked him some questions.

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It’s another packed week for tech, especially in Silicon Valley, where the kibitzing never ends and the econalypse is almost completely ignored.

As if you did not have enough to do, what with all that pointless tweeting, here are some choices for those who want a little analog action, including watching me annoy Facebook’s chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is also trying to become California’s next Attorney General.

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While the current meme is that traditional journalism is getting the stuffing knocked out of it by the digital onslaught, it neglects to notice that a lot of really sharp news reporters are actually getting some real traction by finally starting to be serious about creating online sites that are designed to compete.

As case in point, BoomTown recently visited the offices of TheWrap.com, a Web blog aimed at dominating breaking news about the business of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

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While in Los Angeles today at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference, BoomTown ran smack into blogging empress Arianna Huffington.

She was there to give a speech called “Video Killed the Radio Star…But Can the Web Actually Save Journalism?”

Her answer was a decided yes, especially with great journalists working online, such as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post the mega-blog has just hired.

That would be former CNET Networks Editor-in-Chief Jai Singh, who quit the company last year after a dozen-year run.

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Recently, BoomTown had a lovely lunch with PBS new media blogger Mark Glaser.

Glaser is a longtime free-lance journalist whom I first noticed when he wrote a weekly column for the USC Annenberg School of Communication’s Online Journalism Review, post-Web 1.0 bubble, as well as for the most excellent “Media Grok” daily email newsletter for the now-defunct Industry Standard back in the midst of the froth.

He was always able to cut through that with a clear-headed tone–while maintaining a respect for what was good about traditional journalism, as well as an excitement about the possibilities of new media. Here’s a video interview I did with Glaser about where new media is today.

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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 runs the blog, which is owned and operated by him, covering a wide range of tech topics, from PCs to smartphones to the future of cloud computing.

What I like about Technologizer 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.

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The more things change, the more they actually do change.

At least, according to this excerpt from a 10-questions interview former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox, who now contributes to Time magazine’s Swampland blog, did with Stop Smiling magazine.

In questions No. 7 and 8 here, she discusses the huge differences in the 2004 and 2008 presidential campaigns, in terms of blogs, and how the image of bloggers has shifted dramatically with mainstream media.

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If we were an actual baby, AllThingsD.com would be just about to walk by now.

Hopefully, we have done better than that over the past year and we hope to do even more in the year ahead, attempting to give readers the very best tech news and analysis married with the high standards The Wall Street Journal is known for.

At the same time, we have also tried to also capture the excitement and energy of the blogosphere, in what has been an entrepreneurial effort within a major media company.

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The annual look at the health of journalism by the Project for Excellence in Journalism was just released and the outlook is predictable: Those darn kids love the Internet even more.
In its latest report online, called the State of the News Media 2008, the PEJ cites several continuing trends: news has shifted from being a [...]

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