Last Friday, National Public Radio top execs came to San Francisco for a “Digital Think In” to pick the brains of some Silicon Valley types about where the public radio icon should go, digitally speaking.

While NPR actually has been pretty fast-forward with podcasts and a robust Web site, it still has to think about what social networking means to it and whether a day is coming when broadcasting online will be bigger than offline.

Also, what’s up with Twitter?

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After Facebook announced today that it had acquired online content-sharing site FriendFeed, BoomTown had a chit-chat with Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox, and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

Although neither budged on telling me the purchase price, which various Silicon Valley venture capitalists I spoke to estimated to be about $50 million in cash and stock, the pair came together after several months of casual conversation, probably sometime after Twitter spurned Facebook’s $500 million offer last year.

But, as in failed love affairs, moving on is the next best thing to do!

No word on who got to break the news to No. 1 FriendFeed Fanboy Robert Scoble.

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Now, it’s getting flat-out macabre.

That would be the continuing swirl of attention the health of Apple icon Steve Jobs has been getting.

Rumors of his impending demise have been popping up periodically since the too-thin crisis of the Worldwide Developers Conference in June and look like they won’t stop until it actually comes true.

My grandmother used to have a perfect rejoinder for this kind of funeral-chasing behavior, which was prevalent among her gang of Italian sisters, who–whenever anyone caught a cold–predicted the worst outcome: “Don’t be a crepe-hanger.”

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Last night, BoomTown was at the Horn Group offices in San Francisco to appear on a lively panel called “Is Social Media Killing PR?”

Focused on the “future of the media ecosystem,” it was inspired by recent blog rants by Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington, all of whom have taken potshots at the PR industry as unnecessary or broken in the new social media order.

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Earlier today, BoomTown posted a video of star venture capitalist John Doerr’s 10 tips to start-ups for surviving the econalypse that he ticked off at a roundtable in Silicon Valley on Wednesday.

Beside the words of wisdom from the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner, I also trolled for advice from the panel of well-known entrepreneurs I moderated at VentureBeat’s “How to manage your start-up in the downturn” event.

The message: They will survive! (Cue the disco ball.)

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If it’s Oct. 1, it must be time for the DonorsChoose.org’s Blogger Challenge 2008!

DonorsChoose.org funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors.

Last year, BoomTown did pretty well, raising $12,199 from 52 donors, impacting 1,940 students and almost scoring the grand prize of a lunch with Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

Well, I finally managed to get a dinner with him, as you can see in the video after the jump.

But now I face a more daunting task–besting the naked Scoble!

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In BoomTown’s ongoing quest to overdose on tech conferences, I traveled south of San Francisco last night for Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm: TECH conference.

Run by David Kirkpatrick, it’s well done and a great place to run into a range of techies from Silicon Valley, as well as talk to more creative thinkers on where tech is going.

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Gas prices through the roof?

Mortgage crisis continues?

A looming recession?

You almost have to admire Web 2.0’s fight for their right to party.

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If wishes were horses, all Facebookers would ride!

But alas, even though BoomTown is also intrigued by the idea as much as tech bloggers Robert Scoble and John Furrier, Facebook is not about to be bought by Microsoft.

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OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?
With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.
You know, the new pretty young thing in [...]

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Sorting through the online catfight between video blogger Loren Feldman and social media blogger Shel Israel would surely give BoomTown a big fat migraine.
But it includes puppets and who doesn’t love a roiling puppet-war?
No one, that’s who!
So here are two recent ones Feldman posted on his 1938 Media site, one with his Shel puppet and [...]

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On your fourth day at Facebook, my data said to me: Sheryl will surely set us free.

But, let’s be realistic–getting ubiquitous data portability is about as likely as actually finding a partridge in a pear tree.
Still, here’s an issue the new COO can actually sink her teeth into, as the notion of who [...]

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So we arrived at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with Digital Daily’s John “Patches” Paczkowski yesterday from rain-sodden San Francisco, and launched right into gadgetmania.
While there does not seem to be much news or truly groundbreaking products as of yet out of anywhere–”It’s like no one has anything new, but we have [...]

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This is my third and last post about what my move from old to new media has taught me. In the first, I discussed its dynamism, in the second its amazing level of clarity.
And the third? Well, because it never stops. Ever.

Case in point, a somewhat frivolous story, which actually does have important broader implications [...]

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It is easy to make light of the constant swirl of twittery online activity that surrounds well-known blogger Robert Scoble.
But Facebook’s disabling of his account yesterday–because he was apparently using a script to access and pull data from his own profile there to move it to other social graphs of his choice–is not going to [...]

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