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

First up this week is an event today at which BoomTown will appear called “The Free! Summit: Inside the Digital Economy” in San Mateo.

Given all the recent debate about free versus paid, as traditional media companies take aim at the issue, it should be interesting.

I will be on an afternoon panel called “Business Models That Work,” which is about the the future of news and what’s next for journalism in the digital economy.

The other panelists are: Dan Gillmor, Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Arizona State University; Alan Mutter, Adjunct Faculty Member, Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and founder, “Reflections of a Newsosaur”; and Marshall Van Alstyne, Associate Professor of Information Economics, Boston University and Visiting Professor, MIT.

Later in the day, the event will morph into the third “Tech Policy Summit,” where I get to do a one-on-one interview with Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly, who is still at the social-networking site but is also now running for the job of California’s Attorney General.

(My All Things Digital partner Walt Mossberg will appear on Tuesday, along with a solid slate of speakers.)

On Thursday, ContentNext Media is holding its third EconSm conference, this time focusing on mobile, in an all-day event in San Francisco.

Speakers include: Zander Lurie, CFO, CBS (CBS) Interactive; angel investor Ron Conway (see my recent video interview with him here); Eric Johnson, president and COO, Wolfgang’s Vault; Joe Kennedy, CEO and president, Pandora; and Kevin Thau, director of mobile business development at Twitter.

Wrote paidContent’s Staci Kramer: “Much has changed as we get ready for our third EconSM–including the name. The acronym is still the same but this year it’s about the intersection of social and mobile. Social media has passed the gimmick stage–although not everyone has figured that out–and is part of the daily fabric for an increasing number of people.”

And, if you have even more time, the Aspen Institute has just published J.D. Lasica’s 110-page e-book, “Identity in the Age of Cloud Computing: The Next-Generation Internet’s Impact on Business, Governance and Social Interaction.”

Lasica told me that he wrote the report after a roundtable of 30 experts in identity and technology (people like John Seely Brown and Esther Dyson) was convened in Aspen to discuss the ramifications of the cloud on a societal level.

He talked the Aspen Institute into releasing the e-book under a Creative Commons license, the first time it has ever done that.

And lest you think this is too focused on just Silicon Valley, I missed attending the Seattle 2.0 Awards last week, but here are the winners:

Best Start-up: Picnik
Best Boot-strapped Start-up: Picnik
Best Start-up CEO: Jonathan Sposato (Picnik)
Best Start-up Technologist: Nat Brown (iLike)
Best Venture Capitalist: Matt McIlwain (Madrona Venture Group)
Best Angel Investor: Geoff Entress
Best Start-up Product Designer: Peter Roman (Picnik)
Best Service Provider to Start-ups: Shannon Swift (Swift HR Solutions)
Best Blog from/about Start-ups: TechFlash/John Cook
Best Social Event for Start-ups: Lunch 2.0 by Josh Maher

MySpace has officially announced the appointment of entrepreneur and former AOL exec Mike Jones as COO, as BoomTown reported earlier today.

But the social-networking site also named former Sling Media top exec Jason Hirschhorn as chief product officer in what has become a series of senior management moves at MySpace.

The paidContent Web site first reported on the Hirschhorn appointment earlier this morning.

Besides Sling, which he recently left in a mass departure of top execs, Hirschhorn was also the top digital exec at MTV Networks and was part of the team at Viacom (VIA) that unsuccessfully tried to buy MySpace many years ago.

Both Hirschhorn and Jones, who are already based in Los Angeles, will report to newly named CEO Owen Van Natta, the former COO of Facebook, who replaced MySpace co-founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe last week.

Recently installed News Corp. (NWS) digital head Jon Miller has put in place a trio of well-known Internet execs at the top of MySpace, which has seen its buzz and momentum wane in the face of the huge growth at Facebook.

MySpace’s motto is “A Place for Friends.” But it might very well now be: A place for wandering digital execs.

And expect more top execs to wander away from MySpace too. Once the trio get their bearings, many sources indicate that News Corp., the owner of MySpace, has given Van Natta and his key execs free rein to remake the unit.

There is a lot to fix at the entertainment-, music- and media-heavy site, from a renegotiation with Google (GOOG) over its advertising search deal to goosing traffic to innovating its look and feel.

In addition, MySpace is likely to forge closer tech ties with Silicon Valley, where Facebook is based.

News Corp. already noted that it was in talks with MySpace co-founder and President Tom Anderson about a new role in the company. Also likely to get a major look-see are top execs like sales head Jeff Berman and CTO Aber Whitcomb, as well as a number of others.

To begin, though, the trio will meet the staff of MySpace, more than 1,000 people, in an all-hands event to be held outside of its building in Beverly Hills, Calif., at about 3:30 p.m. today.

Sources tell me there is no space big enough at the HQ to accommodate them, so the courtyard of the building will be used.

BoomTown is in Los Angeles today, by coincidence, but will not be crashing the event, so send interesting tidbits my way.

Here is the full release:

Los Angeles, CA, April 27, 2009–News Corporation today announced an expansion of MySpace’s management team with two key new hires. Michael Jones has been named Chief Operating Officer and Jason Hirschhorn has been named Chief Product Officer, effective immediately. Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn will be based in Los Angeles and report to MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta.

Jones has founded and operated several online businesses, including Userplane, a leading provider of tools for online communities such as MySpace. Userplane was acquired in 2006 by AOL, where Jones subsequently served as a senior vice president and focused on social media monetization and also pioneered the distribution of widgets and other technology to Web publishers. Most recently, he was the founder and CEO of Tsavo Media, an online content and search network developing next-generation publishing platforms and technology services.

Hirschhorn has led both start-up and established online businesses. Most recently, he was president of Sling Media, Inc.’s Entertainment Group, which created consumer-driven applications and services for the Slingbox device. Previously, he was chief digital officer at MTV Networks, where he oversaw the company’s digital media businesses, products and strategies. Hirschhorn joined MTV Networks following the acquisition of his company, Mischief New Media, which provided interactive services to the entertainment industry.

“Michael’s operational insight and knowledge of the social media market will prove to be a valuable asset as we set out to evolve the MySpace product offering,” said Jon Miller, chief digital officer, News Corporation. “From a product perspective, there’s no better choice than Jason, who is highly regarded as an incredibly talented innovator, media executive and leader, all qualities I know will greatly benefit our team and our users.”

“We were attracted to Michael’s unique background in building and operating successful businesses that fall directly in our sweet spot, and I look forward to leveraging his skill set as we further refine and shape the MySpace vision,” said Mr. Van Natta. “Jason’s reputation for creating compelling consumer experiences that leverage the intersection of technology, design and media is unmatched and we’re excited to have him join us.”

“I am so fortunate to have the opportunity to build upon the successes of the company’s founders and am eager to work with Owen and Jon and the rest of the incredible management team at MySpace as we enter this exciting new phase in the company’s already revered history,” said Mr. Jones. Mr. Hirschhorn continued, “MySpace is one of the most alluring innovations of our time and I am honored to collaborate with Tom Anderson and the rest of the MySpace team to take what is already a stellar product into its next evolution.”

(New Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

More musical chairs at Yahoo, which BoomTown predicted recently, as top execs at the company move in and out of jobs, and new ones from the outside move in.

Perhaps the most important change to occur is the replacement this week of SVP Scott Dietzen–who has been in charge of all communications and communities products at Yahoo (YHOO)–by former Adobe Systems (ADBE) exec Bryan Lamkin, several sources said.

Lamkin will become SVP of Applications Products.

According to his profile on LinkedIn, Lamkin (pictured here) was most recently SVP of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit, where the software exec “led product strategy, marketing and product development for Adobe’s flagship software applications, including Photoshop, the Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator.”

Lamkin, who was at Adobe for 14 years, has more recently been an executive-in-residence at two venture firms, New Enterprise Associates and Sutter Hill Ventures.

He will take over for Dietzen, who came to Yahoo in 2007 after its $350 million Zimbra open-source email acquisition

Dietzen–whom sources said is more entrepreneurial than managerial and did not want to lead such a big organization at the Internet giant–will become VP of strategy in the move. Many said they expect he will eventually leave Yahoo to try his hand at another start-up.

His colleague, Zimbra founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj, left Yahoo earlier this year to join Redpoint Ventures as a VC.

In his job since, Dietzen has been busy fixing Yahoo’s mail and calendar offerings. (See my video interview with him below from last fall.)

But that’s not all.

Also afoot is a restructuring of Yahoo’s North American sales unit, with the unexpected promotion of Mitch Spolan, who was a regional sales exec and will now be in charge of all North American field sales.

The paidContent Web site reported the sales changes first, which have been rumored around Yahoo recently.

Spolan jumped over two more senior execs, sources said, who run sales operations for the East and West coasts. One of those execs, Beth Lawrence, will now run Yahoo’s relations with agencies. Both report to U.S. sales SVP Joanne Bradford.

Over the last 18 months, Yahoo has seen a bleeding of its advertising staff to a wide range of Silicon Valley Web companies, including, most recently, Yahoo’s VP of Sales Operations Dan Foehner to social-networking site Facebook.

Lastly, one of Yahoo’s most senior communications execs, Brad Williams, was let go as part of its recent round of layoffs. He had been running PR–admirably and with good cheer, I might add, despite all the bad news–since its head, Jill Nash, departed earlier this year.

Williams’s departure was first reported by The Wall Street Journal tonight. He came to Yahoo in early 2008 from eBay (EBAY).

New marketing head Elisa Steele, who was hired by CEO Carol Bartz, had recently hired a headhunting firm to find a new PR chief, sources said, and Williams was not considered as a candidate for the job.

UPDATE: Yahoo confirmed my report above.

A spokesman sent me the following info about Lamkin’s appointment:

Bryan Lamkin, formerly of Adobe, is joining Yahoo! as senior vice president of Applications Products, reporting directly to Ari Balogh. As a reminder, the Applications Products group consists of several key global products for Yahoo!, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups and Zimbra.

Bryan brings a wealth of experience on the consumer technology front and his background ties in nicely with Yahoo!’s ongoing focus to deliver great consumer experiences across the globe.

Bryan takes over for Scott Dietzen, who was named the interim head of Application Products following the reorg back in February. Scott will continue on at Yahoo!, and will work across Yahoo!’s Applications Products in a new product strategy role.

Bio

Bryan Lamkin

Senior Vice President, Applications Product, Yahoo!

Bryan Lamkin joins Yahoo! as the senior vice president of Applications Products. In this role, he will oversee the global strategy, development and performance for key products within the Yahoo! portfolio, including Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Groups and Zimbra.

Lamkin most recently served as senior vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions, Adobe’s largest business unit. Lamkin led product strategy, marketing and research and development for Adobe’s flagship software applications, including the Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, the Creative Suite, Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator.

In his 14 years at Adobe Systems, Lamkin held key management positions including Senior Vice President and General Manager, Digital Imaging and Video and Vice President of Marketing, Professional Publishing Solutions. Lamkin was responsible for product development and marketing as well as the acquisition and product integration strategies that established Adobe’s overwhelming leadership in digital imaging and video and web publishing. Before joining Adobe Systems, Lamkin served in key product marketing and international product development roles at Software Publishing Corporation and holds both a BA and MBA from the University of California at Berkeley.

And here is Dietzen in my video interview:

The large round by Oak, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blog site a valuation of just “south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“There is an inevitable shift from offline to online with people increasingly getting their news media online, and this election proved how powerful the Huffington Post could be,” said Harman (pictured here), in an interview with BoomTown. “And I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site.”

Indeed, the Huffington Post–which is now billing itself as ‘”The Internet Newspaper”–has been hitting on all cylinders during the current election season.

And it hopes to continue building that momentum into the Obama administration, which will give the liberal-leaning site a lot of advantages in coverage.

The Huffington Post has also become a powerful news aggregator, much as the more conservative Drudge Report has, sending traffic all over the Web from its site by linking with a variety of online sites. It also has a strong offering of high-profile bloggers.

But the site’s leaders are also hoping its traffic strength will allow it to be as strong in arenas outside of its flagship political arena, including in business, local, “green” and investigative news.

It will also use the money to make acquisitions, the company said in a press release about the funding, which it put out this morning.

It’s certainly a long way from May of 2005, when its high-profile co-founder, Arianna Huffington, was roundly mocked for launching the site. Today, she has seen her power grow as the site’s traffic and influence have.

The site’s namesake operates out of her California-based office in Los Angeles, while the company has its HQ in New York.

The Huffington Post’s traffic in September 2008, for example, quadrupled from a year before to 4.5 million unique visitors, according to comScore (SCOR). That performance made it the No. 1 “stand-alone political blog and news site,” besting Drudge.

“The cycle of print media is accelerating downward and there are not as many companies with a balance sheet and focus to do it right online,” said Harman, who will join the Huffington Post’s board. “The news market is really up for grabs in a lot of ways…and it is a good time for those who are viewed as authoritative.”

But, like a lot of advertising-reliant businesses, the Huffington Post is also facing a tough market and must show it can compete under more dire economic circumstances and build a sustained and profitable business.

This slug of money should give it a lot of room to do so, said Harman, who has invested in several digital media companies, such as Demand Media and Federated Media. He was also one of the lead investors in aQuantive, the digital advertising business that was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.

“Who knows how deep this economic situation is going to be,” said Harman, who noted that he and others kept investing in aQuantive through the last Web downturn. “But strong companies that keep investing through a bad cycle can emerge as winners.”

Previous investments in the Huffington Post have totaled about $12 million. That funding has come from Softbank Capital and Greycroft Partners, as well as seed money from co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former AOL exec Bob Pittman.

Funding reports about the Huffington Post appeared about a week ago in the Times of London, with the post claiming a $15 million investment and expansion into investigative and local news.

But the most detailed posts were done by paidContent, which was the first to name Oak as the new investor and said the round was $20 million.

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.

I was here in summer 2007 and also last fall. This trip, I am slated to visit Mike Volpi of Joost to talk about what’s going on at that much-hyped online video site, which is in the midst of rejiggering itself after a rocky start.

I will also be paying a call on the fine folks over at the Guardian, including its PDA digital content blogger Jemima Kiss.

The Guardian Media Group, the newspaper’s parent company, is doing some really fast-forward things in the digital arena, including the recent purchase of the paidContent new media news site.

And tomorrow, I will be having yet another grilled kipper breakfast at the very tony Wolseley restaurant with Index Ventures’ Danny Rimer to talk about the start-up market here.

Videos, of course, to come.

With the sale of paidContent to the Guardian Media Group and the talks TechCrunch has been in with AOL, there certainly is a lot of hubbub around tech blogging sites of late.

One of the more interesting sites that has gone up over the last year is Silicon Alley Insider, which is headlined by former Internet analyst Henry Blodget (yes, that Henry Blodget).

But featuring Blodget’s speedy analysis of big trends, and news about Web and media players, with a sprinkling of reporting from its small team of writers, it’s been a sharp entrant into the sector.

Perhaps most compelling is that the site is backed by Web 1.0 entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, former CEO of DoubleClick (GOOG), who has nested SAI inside a network of new Web efforts at AlleyCorp.

Ryan founded what is essentially a Web 2.0 version of an incubator with former DoubleClick CTO Dwight Merriman.

While one can debate DoubleClick’s ads-in-your-digital-face strategy over its growth (it is now a division of Google), there is no question Ryan’s aggressive early efforts set the stage for the commercialization of the Web that continues today.

Now Ryan is trying to do the same for Web content on SAI. It just got a new small slug of funding; Blodget is also adding two new business sites to the mix.

What AlleyCorp all means is a bit eclectic. Ryan’s network of affiliated sites includes the content delivery network Panther Express, the 10gen apps development platform, a shopping engine called ShopWiki, the Music Nation independent music community and an online invitation-only, high-fashion sample sale site called Gilt Groupe.

Although SAI has a high profile, Gilt is perhaps the most intriguing of AlleyCorp’s sites since it is essentially an American copy of a highly successful European version.

Using the Web’s speed and the allure of an exclusive, limited sale of designer clothes, along with an Amazon-like shipping system, is perhaps the perfect mix of offline and online. It also has to potential to move into other e-commerce categories.

Here’s my video interview with Ryan about all this and more:

I have posted below a video interview with ContentNext’s founder Rafat Ali, who spoke about the deal. I caught up with him in his New York hotel this morning (by coincidence I flew into New York today on a redeye).

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.

Several sources told me TechCrunch has been in off-and-on talks recently with Time Warner’s AOL (TWX), which wants to pay from $20 and $30 million for the site.

I could not find out what price TechCrunch thinks is fair, although one might assume it is higher than that.

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde told me via email that she had no comment. “My policy is not to comment on rumors of our business,” she wrote.

TechCrunch, which was founded in mid-2005 by Michael Arrington, is a group-edited blog that has grown large by focusing–”obsessively,” according to the site’s About page–on Web 2.0 start-ups, covering every jog and tittle of their life cycles.

Sources said the talks between TechCrunch and AOL have been ongoing for the past six to eight weeks, although the site has been in talks with several other large media companies interested in it in the past and these have not led to an acquisition.

AOL would probably be a good home for a site like TechCrunch, since it has a blog focus from its own Switched site and sites it bought, like Engadget.

AOL acquired that popular gadget site in 2005 in the $25 million acquisition of Weblogs, which was founded by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis.

Calacanis, by the way, runs an annual tech conference with TechCrunch, now called TechCrunch50.

Also, I have stayed in Calacanis’s house in the Brentwood (see post and video here), when I was interviewing a Disney exec onstage at a paidContent conference in Los Angeles recently.

Oh, yes, it’s a small tech blogging world after all.

But the money has suddenly become big for the sites involved in that universe too, although most still have relatively small businesses.

Nonetheless, tech bloggers have grown in number and influence, as sites–like this one–compete to break news and attract readers.

Such efforts take funding–despite the lower costs as compared with traditional media–and this probably means inevitable consolidation.

Before its acquisition by Guardian, for example, ContentNext had been raising several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

Other sites have also recently raised funds, such as GigaOm, Silicon Alley Insider and VentureBeat.

Most of them have also been talking about various roll-ups between and among one other. Sources told me that VentureBeat, for example, has spoken separately in the past to both paidContent and TechCrunch about joining forces.

VentureBeat’s Founder Matt Marshall would not comment on that, but did note that “size matters, so you have to do what you can to get the economics of scale.”

That includes adding on more sites and doing conferences, as VentureBeat has done (its new conference is called MobileBeat, for example, which will take place in Sunnyvale, Calif. on July 24.)

“Consolidation is what you are probably going to see,” predicted Marshall about the tech blogging arena.

Here’s ContentNext’s Ali talking about exactly that and more today:

In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

That price, though, includes an earn-out, sources said, which will depend on future performance of the company.

The paidContent site is owned by ContentNext and was founded by Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali in 2002.

With the motto,”The Economics of Content,” paidContent has been a pioneer in the online news space, doing high-quality reporting about online media and digital efforts by big media companies.

ContentNext has offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Manhattan and operates several other sites, and also runs several conferences.

The company had reportedly been raising funding of several million dollars recently to fuel more expansion.

But ContentNext’s only financial backer so far has been Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, which invested an undisclosed amount in 2006.

Longtime digital media exec Larry Kramer is on its board and ContentNext recently hired media exec Nathan Richardson as its CEO.

Sources said ContentNext would continue being run independently after the Guardian purchase.

This sale comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica, a much larger tech-focused site, to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million.

More to come soon.

But until then, here’s a video I did with Ali just over a year ago in a when I visited his then-new offices in Santa Monica.

As readers of AllThingsD.com might have noticed, we added MarketWatch columnist Therese Poletti (pictured here) to the main rail of the site today.

Her twice-weekly column, Tech Tales, which appears on MarketWatch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, will also be published here too.

Poletti joins Eric Savitz (pictured here) of Barron’s, whose posts on his Tech Trader Daily blog about tech stocks have been appearing on the front of ATD several times a day for the past month.

We added these two very talented voices from other publications within Dow Jones (owner of this site), because we want to bring more cogent and useful news and analysis about tech and media to our readers. Also, they rock.

In all seriousness, the tech blogging arena is one with a lot of players–some great and some not so much–so we are especially proud of the high standards, accuracy and quality that each of these writers represents.

We will be adding more writers soon, so watch this space.

Of course, we also don’t believe in only cross-promoting Dow Jones brands, and publish a half-dozen major links to other sites daily in Voices, along with our tabbed front page feeds that link directly to CNET, paidContent, GigaOm and Techmeme.

We admire the work those sites are doing and, most of all, want to give our readers as many ways as possible to access the best posts being done across the digital landscape.

Of course, BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily remain the anchor of the main rail, while the work of Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret gets its own place at the top of the main home page of ATD.

In all, we hope readers find our commitment to giving you high-quality and incisive work–from scoops to analysis to reviews–helpful and we welcome any feedback.

Today, we debut our new redesign of the home screen of AllThingsD.com.

It is, in fact, our second redesign since we launched the site in late April of 2007, although it is a much more drastic redesign, with a lot more elements added.

Why did we do it? No, we are not hyperactive (OK, we are, but we are taking medication for that).

Actually, it is because we in the ATD brain trust (that would be Walt Mossberg and me), along with our many much-more-intelligent staffers and advisers, wanted to bring even more digital news and analysis to our readers by making more stories available on the front page from us and also from around the Web.

Our aim was simple: Now newsier than ever!

In fact, we hope you will find our new look linktastic, as we try hard to embrace the notion that ATD’s audience wants to be able to find great tech and media stories anywhere and everywhere.

Just fyi, the inside sections remain exactly the same–it is only the front page that has undergone the renovation.

Here’s a quick tour, from the top to the bottom of the page:

Megablog: We combined the BoomTown and John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily blogs in one rolling one in the center rail.

We felt that it allowed us to feature a lot more of our stories on the main page longer, up to 20 typically, and also made it easier for readers to find stories before they dropped off the front.

We will be adding more material to this section soon, as we develop our content further.

Walt Mossberg: Walt’s weekly Personal Technology and Mailbox columns and Mossblog, as well as Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution, move up and to the right in a high-profile spot.

As ever, Walt is the site’s amazing anchor and a tech consumer’s greatest adviser, telling it like it is and writing reviews that matter.

Tech Headlines: On the top left, we wanted to bring in the stellar work from our Dow Jones brethren at The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and MarketWatch, as well as from the Dow Jones newswires, to give readers links to as many stories as we can as news breaks.

This section will be updated every nine minutes to keep it fresh and new.

Voices: This section on the left remains the same, except it goes vertical. We try to hand-select (no stinkin’ algorithm for us) from across the digital blogosphere, so we can feature blog posts we think you need to see to keep up.

Also, expect more guest bloggers who write original posts just for ATD, like one tomorrow from Slide’s Keith Rabois, giving BoomTown a hard time for our problem with juvenile widgets.

The Tech Top 10: Also on the left, just below Voices, we keep our edited Tech Top 10, a list of the stories we think you need to know about every day.

Video: On the right is our featured video. We do a lot of video at ATD and we will feature our latest-posted here.

Tech Around the Web: Also on the right, we are posting, via RSS, the feed from four digital news sources we like and think are useful for our audience.

Two are editorially driven sites, paidContent and GigaOm, who we believe are combining the energy of the blogosphere and also providing readers with trusted reporting that also adheres to the standards of accuracy and ethics we try to operate under too.

This is a big focus for us at ATD and we want to point readers to high-quality material. They say you are judged by the company you keep and we could not agree more.

Both Digg and Techmeme, of course, are the key news aggregators of the sector and we like how helpful they are in surfacing important tech and media stories for readers.

Just click on each tab to get to each section. This section will also be constantly refreshed throughout the day.

More ads: Well, we have to pay the bills, don’t we? We hope you do find them useful and don’t find them too intrusive.

There will be even more to come from us in the coming weeks, especially as we gear up for the sixth edition of the D: All Things Digital conference, which is taking place May 27 to 29.

So, please let us know what you think of our new look, as we would love feedback.

And special thanks to all who worked on the redesign, including Mike Monteiro of Mule Design Studio and especially the tireless and multi-talented Adam Tow, our Web genius.

GodTube, which describes itself as a Christian video-driven social-networking site, “where users find inspiration, interact, chat, share and upload” Christian video, has about 2 million users per month.

GodTube also lets churches stream sermons and other events live on its “Godcaster” subscription service.

Also, its motto is “Broadcast Him,” but GodTube also calls itself “Jesus 2.0.” Get it?

Perhaps more in the holy-grail territory, GodTube just nabbed $30 million this week in funding from GLG Partners (GLG), which is also an investor in the less-holy Glam Media site, according to paidContent.

That gives the Dallas-based GodTube a $150 million valuation, putting it right up there with other miraculous start-up valuations like yesterday’s $500 million valuation for the online ad agency Spot Runner.

Praise the VC (and, for GodTube fans, JC too)!

Here’s the North Point Church video on GodTube:

In the first, he egregiously ignores BoomTown’s subtle (as a hammer!) way of asking about the Microsoft (MSFT) situation.

In the second, Weiner talks about Yahoo’s (YHOO) social-networking strategy (translation: this is not yet another social network, because we–oops–neglected to build one people liked!).

In the third, he talks about Yahoo’s “White Hat” ad plans to allow consumers to someday pick their own ads.

And, finally, in the fourth clip, Weiner disses YouTube’s (GOOG) business model (or lack thereof).

Unfortunately not here, our back-and-forth about what kind of food Yahoo would serve if it were a restaurant–you had to be there–given its reputation for being all over the map. My suggestion: Everything.

But, personally, BoomTown really enjoyed Weiner’s wire-cutting performance in the Yahoo spoof video, called “All Hands, the Movie,” which Yahoo execs made and showed to its troops recently.

Weiner’s performance, which is at the start in a James-Bond-diffusing-the-bomb moment, is actually really good (and especially compared to other execs, like the golf sadist role for CEO Jerry Yang and the broom-wielding President Sue Decker).

Plus, finally–a really good use for his legendary “Miami Vice” stubble beard.

Here’s a link to Valleywag, which got a copy of the full (and quite clever) video, and a screen shot of Weiner below.

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 will be sitting rapt in the front row, as folks like Yahoo’s (YHOO) Jeff Weiner, Bebo’s Joanna Shields and AOL’s (TWX) Ron Grant talk about how social media is going to finally make money.

BoomTown is on a vision quest to answer that question in the coming year, so we are kicking entrepreneurs and taking names!

Here’s a short video I did on the opening night, including talking to paidContent’s Staci Kramer and Seth Goldstein of Social Media.

But, first, it starts with a tour of my temporary L.A. abode at the home of Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis:

If they go there will be trouble. And if they stay it will be double.

In other words, BoomTown’s got nothing!

I am traveling this morning to Los Angeles for paidContent’s Economics of Social Media conference, where I will interview Walt Disney Internet Group President Steve Wadsworth onstage tomorrow.

But I will be sure to update after I arrive, as I have a new theory on the takeover I am noodling on.

Until then, here’s a nice summation from The Wall Street Journal here, saying absolutely nothing new too, but nicely hashing over the details thus far.

Money quote: “There was no direct contact between the two sides this past weekend and people close to both camps said they were preparing for the next stage of battle.”

Thus, while loins are apparently being girded, here is a very nice video of the Clash, singing their hit song (and how much do I love this song? Much!):