Back on April 7, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.”

It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally.

More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day:

“The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we’ll review the feedback we’ve received–both internal and external. We’ll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into the next decade of digital leadership. Most importantly, we will set a course and focus all of our resources to make that course a success.”

BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and what path it will ultimately put AOL on.

So far, the broad outlines of his strategy seem to center on expanding AOL’s content assets, strengthening its advertising network and getting out of businesses the company cannot compete well in, such as social networking.

What other pearls of wisdom Armstrong has gleaned are to still to be revealed, presumably.

His corporate version of “The Amazing Race” is certainly a novel idea, born at his first all-hands meeting in Dulles, Va., which used to be the world-wide HQ of AOL and remains its heart.

There, Armstrong (pictured here) joked to the crowd:

“I know that work goes on across the globe and, in the first 90 days, I’m going to try to visit every office we have and sit down and talk to every employee and that will be something that my wife has actually agreed to let me do so.”

Thus, spouse-approved, the former Google (GOOG) exec has circumnavigated the globe and has held meeting with employees in a wide range of places: Dulles; New York; Baltimore; San Francisco; Mountain View, Calif.; Toronto, Lancaster, Pa.; Denver; Hamburg; London; Paris; Bangalore; Dublin and, this week, Tel Aviv.

But it has not been all tourism, in search of innovation.

During this time, Armstrong has also dispatched employees and top execs, such as advertising head Greg Coleman and communications and communities head Joanna Shields, and hired a few key staffers of his own; announced a pending spinoff of the company; and bought some stuff (including a company he funded).

It will be interesting to see what comes next–after the 100-day gathering in Dulles, which should come sometime after Armstrong’s July 15 deadline, of course.

Party on, Tim.

BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference.

Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday.

U.S. speakers include TED’s Chris Anderson, News Corp. (NWS) social-networking site MySpace’s Amit Kapur, Marissa Mayer of Google (GOOG), Linda Avey of 23andMe, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft (MSFT).

And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard, and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

Of course, there’s a passel of bloggers here like BoomTown. I’ll be interviewing Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon (AMZN) and well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.

Besides this conference, Loïc Le Meur has been trying to make a go of it with his San Francisco-based start-up Seesmic, which–like a lot of Web 2.0 companies–has recently made cutbacks. See my video interview below with him in better times, when I visited Seesmic in February.

You can also watch the conference streamed live from its site. More shaky–but Frenchtastic, although no lip-synching extravaganzas for me!–videos from me at Le Web to come, of course.

[Full disclosure: My partner, Google exec Megan Smith (you can read all about it here in detail), is judging a start-up competition at Le Web on Wednesday. But I am trying to find an excuse not to go to that panel, because I always nod off at those things, even if the crazy version of Britney Spears were a judge. Instead, I hopefully will be enjoying the lovely artwork at the Louvre right then.]

BoomTown always enjoys chatting with the always sunny Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic (and will, in fact, be appearing at his Paris-based digital conference in December, called Le Web).

But I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile that was in this picture above (click in the image to make it larger), which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs.

In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

Money–or, more accurately, non-money–quote from the Times piece:

“To preserve cash, many tech start-ups are rushing to lay off employees and cut expenses. They are shelving their dreams of Google-size riches and getting small, humble and thrifty, all with the more modest goal of surviving the coming economic winter.”

In a less puritan mode, Seesmic raised $6 million in May from a bunch of high-profile angels, of $12 million total.

They include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, former Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.

Now, Le Meur is trying to stretch his dollars in the economic downturn, spurred by venture capitalists who have been pressing entrepreneurs like him to do so.

“If I can’t make this work in three years it will be a failure,” Mr. Le Meur said to the Times. “If I can and I get through this, it will be much stronger.”

In other words, what doesn’t kill us …

C’est la vie in Silicon Valley!

But in more bon-vivant times, back in February, I did a video post on my happier visit to Seesmic’s San Francisco HQ.

(Note: Many in the video are no longer at Seesmic and neither are the shows discussed, as well as the now-defunct Web 2.0 sentiments about growth without revenue.)

Here’s the video:

Image Credit: Jim Wilson/New York Times

Yesterday, BoomTown was hanging in Hollywood at ContentNext’s EconCeleb’s conference, where I did an onstage interview with legendary editor Bonnie Fuller about the massive impact of the Internet on celebrity journalism.

With its instant ability to deliver news, video and more, sites like TMZ, PerezHilton, The Superficial and Yahoo’s (YHOO) omg! have become massive drivers of traffic on the Internet and–despite the saturation–the arena is still growing fast, especially among women users.

But for those not in the know about Fuller’s impact on how celebrity journalism has developed to its current power, she is the reason–more than any other modern editor–humanity now knows every move made by the unholy trio of Paris, Lindsay and, most of all, Britney.

As founding editor of US Weekly (with stints at Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and other mags), and as the editorial director of the parent company of Star magazine, Fuller’s various editorial innovations–celebrities are just like us!–are now commonplace.

And like a lot of old media stars, Fuller is now working on her own new celeb-focused digital and media company, which she says is aimed at women 20 to 40 years old, plunging headlong into the Web arena.

Here’s my video interview with her in an alcove of the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, where we discuss what she is up to and where online celebrity coverage is going (Britney 24-7!):

Here are links to the posts I have done from BoomTown’s trip to Europe–with glamorous stops in England, France and Monaco (and all the videos are below too!)–in chronological order going backward:

Kara Visits the Royal Society in London

Kara Visits Cambridge University

Kara Visits a Feast!

Silicon Valley Loses to the Brits!

Kara Visits Dailymotion in Paris

Kara Visits Netvibes in Paris

Kara Visits the Monaco Media Forum: More Interviews on the French Riviera!

Kara Visits the Monaco Media Forum: Opening Dinner

Kara Visits Monte-Carlo

After my visit to Netvibes, I also went over to another cool Web company here that I have been following for a while: Dailymotion.

Based in Paris and funded with $32 million from Atlas Venture and Partech International, the video-sharing site positions itself these days as kind of an anti-YouTube–better at programming, easier to use with new tools for both user-generated and more professional content and more vigilant about copyright protection.

In fact, big media companies–like YouTube-suing Viacom–have singled out Dailymotion as an online video site they can do business with, even as they are also launching premium sites of their own.

But, obviously, offering premium fare from media giants is not Dailymotion’s main aim. Unusual videos are and, indeed, the fare on the site is a step up from typical cats-on-skateboards videos. Today, for example, there’s a cool video on skydiving in the Maldives.

Still, while popular in France, where it really counts at this point–the United States–Dailymotion obviously lags way behind YouTube in traffic. Nonetheless, it is not doing badly compared to other similar sites.

According to a report this summer from comScore:

Dailymotion.com has taken hold in the U.S., drawing more than 4.7 million video streamers in April. The average video streamer at Dailymotion.com viewed more than 10 videos and nearly one hour of video content in the month. Metacafe.com also generated substantial activity, as 3.7 million streamers viewed 33 million video streams, while Break.com saw 3.1 million streamers view 32 million video streams. Veoh.com, which attracted the smallest video-viewing audience of the group, had the highest level of user engagement with more than 104 minutes per streamer, benefiting from the many full-length videos hosted on the site.”

In any case, as these sites sort out their business plans–which YouTube is also still doing–to figure out a way to make money from advertising, here’s a chat I had with Dailymotion co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Benjamin Bejbaum:

(I am still having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded this to Dailymotion, which is a nifty player anyway.)

Please see this disclosure related to me and YouTube (owned by Google).