Last night, “The News Hour With Jim Lehrer” aired a piece on “how technology companies are innovating amid the recession by designing popular new smart phone applications.”

BoomTown was to talk about how perhaps not all of the 65,000 apps being created by legions of third-party developers for the Apple iPhone will result in gold, diamonds and unicorns raining down on entrepreneurs.

Oddly enough, I somehow went all Jules Verne at the end and started talking about screens on coffee tables, so I am obviously just as bad.

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Twitter co-founder Biz Stone can be seen tomorrow night in an interview with Tavis Smiley on his PBS show, talking about the denial-of-service attacks on the hot microblogging service recently.

In the interview, noting that Twitter had spent 2008 scaling up its platform to deal with its exploding popularity, Stone said the San Francisco-based start-up was now trying to get up to speed on malicious attackers.

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How much should you ponder this amazing video from an upcoming new documentary series by Ken Burns–titled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”–on America’s national parks system?

Muchly much, as the national parks have indeed been one of this country’s most amazing gifts to itself.

Set to air on PBS on September 27, the creators stuck a video clip that is almost 27 minutes long on YouTube and on the series’ own really nice Web site, which is a pretty terrific thing to do.

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Legendary former MTV Networks exec and co-founder John Sykes will replace outgoing CEO Owen Van Natta as CEO of the controversial music-sharing site, Project Playlist.

He is a high-profile choice to take over for Van Natta, who was officially named CEO of MySpace this morning by News Corp.

Sykes is well regarded in the music industry, an important criterion since Playlist has been dealing with legal attacks from some music labels. Settling with them will be key to the start-up’s survival.

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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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Interoperate’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose: 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 …

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