All Things Digital

Does the tech march ever slow down?

Not this week it doesn’t! And Digital Daily’s live-blogger de tutti live-bloggers John Paczkowski will be there to cover every move.

Today, in case you haven’t heard, is the big annual Apple event: The Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. And, tomorrow brings a Google App confab.

Nutritional journalism information: We’ll be bringing it to you un-processed, but promise it will account of 100 percent of your daily accuracy value.

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Today, at the Silicom Summit at Stanford University, BoomTown was on a panel about consumer media, and right in a front seat paying rapt attention was Steve Wozniak.

It was the same Woz–the famous nickname of the Apple co-founder–who was also staring back last week at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference and taking it all in.

So, of course, I whipped out the Flip digital video camera and asked him some questions.

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That would be Walt Mossberg and his well-known Personal Technology and Mossberg Mailbox columns–as well as BoomTown, John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily, Peter Kafka’s MediaMemo, Katherine Boehret’s Mossberg Solution and video and pictures from our famous D: All Things Digital conferences.

Today, All Things Digital is introducing its very own app for Apple’s iPhone and the iPod touch, offering all the posts and columns you get on this Web site–including news, product reviews, analysis and video–from our crack team.

Just smaller and cuter.

So download us and take us along everywhere you go–ATD really enjoys long walks on the beach.

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Oh dear, I always forget that the camera is turned on 24/7 these days, knows all and sees all and then sticks it on YouTube.

Like this moment for me that came during a speech I gave last week at the Software & Information Industry Association’s NetGain conference in San Francisco, which was titled, “How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Tweet: What Interactivity Really Means for Real Businesses.”

In 140 words or fewer, I insult Amazon’s Kindle, Apple and even myself for being a Steve Jobs fanboy.

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Yesterday, in a BoomTown post about the latest unproven rumors that the world’s most iconic computer company, Apple, was in “late-stage” negotiations to buy Silicon Valley’s latest pretty young thing, microblogging service Twitter, I wrote:

“Oh, the very notion of Apple and Twitter is a Techmeme dream-ticket, sure to be chewed over for days on end. (I once considered doing a post that just said “AppleTwitterAppleTwitterAppleTwitter…” for 1,000 words to see how much idiotic traffic I would get.)”

Well, I reconsidered.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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Here come more tech earnings this week, as investors hope the industry can help goose a still shaky economy.

But while the tech industry is healthy, relatively speaking, they probably should not hope too hard to be soaring anytime soon on Silicon Valley’s digital flying carpet.

In other words, down is still the new up.

In any case, on deck this week: IBM, Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft.

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This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition :)”

Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there).

Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.

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While the fireworks were great, the most important thing that “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart elicited out of CNBC’s most famous stock jester, Jim Cramer, was the admission of using the malleable press to float fictional rumors about companies in order to make money on the negative news.

While Cramer at first tried to deny he did it, Stewart had the videotape of the “Mad Money” host talking about the practice, specifically in regards to Apple.

Kind of puts all those Steve-Jobs-Is-Dead-Right-Now rumors from a few months ago into a new light?

While we all know Jobs has been quite ill, grave-dancing rumors written without any serious reporting have also been a troublesome issue, because it was clear greedy short-sellers played a large part in stoking the fear about his immediate demise back then.

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Peter Chernin might be going from News Corp. But he’s not forgotten, at the least by our little tech Web site (see, Peter, we still like you, even if you’re–almost–no longer our boss!).

In fact, you can see him in action after the jump in a video, talking about digital issues and more in a long interview I did with him onstage at the fifth D: All Things Digital conference in 2007.

Will the 57-year-old Chernin–who was top choice to head Yahoo and has been mentioned as a possible leader at Apple–have his next act in tech?

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Last week, an obviously jet lagged (and badly dressed, as some troglodyte commenters on Yahoo pointed out, but it was snowing!) BoomTown visited with Henry Blodget at Yahoo’s Tech Ticker studio in Times Square to talk about a range of digital topics.

The video interviews included: How well Apple will do without Steve Jobs on deck; whether blogging reporting and professionalism standards need to rise; when Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Time Warner online unit AOL will stop dancing around various deals; and, finally, how the recession is impacting Silicon Valley.

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Early this morning, Bloomberg reported that regulators are looking into Apple’s disclosures about the health–or lack thereof–of its iconic CEO Steve Jobs.

And while BoomTown has railed against the creepy obsession the media have had with Jobs’s health and the publishing of rumors and innuendos about it as fact without a whole lot of reporting, I hope it is true.

It is also entirely appropriate that the government agency charged with keeping an eye on public companies does investigate–at the very least, to get the story right.

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Over the next two weeks, tech companies will be reporting their fourth-quarter earnings and the expectations are pretty much what you might imagine: Bad to very bad to very, very bad.

That’s bad, of course, because tech has been one of the bright spots in the U.S. economy, with strong returns quarter after quarter for a long time now.

It begins today with IBM, followed by Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

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The restless frenzy is what is perhaps most disturbing of all about the never-ending obsessive death watch that has centered on Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

What doesn’t make your skin crawl about it?

That’s why BoomTown thinks it is time to listen to the wise words Jobs delivered at a now legendary Stanford Commencement address in 2005.

The last words of the speech came from the back of “The Whole Earth Catalog”: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

I think right about now, that foolish part has gone way too far for Jobs and the rest of us.

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Yahoo’s board has approved Carol Bartz for the company’s top job and Bartz has accepted. What happens next? Yahoo’s CEO post has been the subject of speculation of one kind or another for most of the past year, and BoomTown’s had the right story earlier–and more often–than anywhere else. Tune in here for the latest developments in the ongoing story.

• Sue Decker’s Goodbye Memo to the Yahoo Troops
• Yahoo’s Decker Resigned With Class–Now Chairman Bostock Should Exit Stage Right Too
• The Past Is Prologue: Carol Bartz and Autodesk in 1992=Yahoo Now
• Carol Bartz: The ALL CAPS CEO
• Live-Blogging Yahoo’s Bartz as CEO Announcement: Her First Words? “Yahoooo!” and “Friggin’”
• Yahoo Confirms Bartz Pick as CEO; No. 2 Exec Decker Out
• Is a Microsoft Search Deal With Yahoo “Ticked and Tied”?
• Bartz to Be Named Yahoo CEO: Now What’s Next?
• Yahoo Investors: We Would Have Preferred Steve Jobs…
• First Up for Carol Bartz: Deliver Yahoo’s Miserable Q4 Report Card
• As BoomTown Said, Bartz Is Tops on the Yahoo CEO Short List–Here’s the Reaction
• New Prospect for Yahoo CEO: Carol Bartz

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