If spinning is an intense political skill, former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is doing her very best at trying to create a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

As Om Malik reports on GigaOm, Whitman–who is trying to nab the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California–told a radio interviewer recently that “actually I think Skype will prove to be a good acquisition for eBay.”

Well, good if you mean the $2.6 billion purchase of the Interent telephony that didn’t ever work as Whitman had effusively promised in 2005. Or the ugly lawsuits over it. Or the successful shakedown by its co-founders to get a big chunk back.

You get the idea.

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Earlier this week, while in New York, BoomTown paid a visit to well-known media and Web exec Bob Pittman to hear about his newest venture.

And, as it turned out, it tasted pretty good.

That’s because the former MTV wunderkind, AOL top exec and currently, investor in a wide range of media and Web companies, is making tequila instead of Internet sites.

Thank God it’s Friday!

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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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This morning, BoomTown was on the very terrific National Public Radio talk show, “On Point,” along with Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain.

The program, moderated by Tom Ashbrook on Boston’s WBUR station, was titled “From Desktop to the Digital Cloud” and dealt with the increasing move of data of all kinds online and into the so-called “cloud.”

In other words, eventually, a completely virtual life for music, photos, records and more, and the end of packaged software.

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In what is quite possibly the most spot-on comment about Twitter that BoomTown has heard thus far, Harvard University Professor Jonathan Zittrain said about its use by Iranians protesting the election results there:

“It is easy for Twitter feeds to be echoed everywhere else in the world. The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what make it so powerful.”

In other words, Twitter is so simplistic and silly that it is a perfect digital tool to overthrow a government–which kind of makes the trendy microblogging service the Forrest Gump of international relations.

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Because BoomTown always has a lot to say, getting a call from American Public Media’s Marketplace Morning radio show pontificate on the Microsoft-Yahoo-Carl Icahn takeover drama was too tasty to pass up.

We also talked a bit about the upcoming Apple unveiling of its 3G iPhone.

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Today, in the week of the first coming of the iPhone from Apple, John Paczkowski gives us a glimpse of Steve Jobs’s awesome hypnotic power over the cellphone carriers the Apple CEO called “orifices” at our D conference two years ago in John’s Digital Daily video.
That Jobs got AT&T to bend to his enormous will [...]

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