Fortune magazine–which never met a list it did not like to make–had a solid group of women tech types on its “50 Most Powerful Women 2009” roster, the annual survey it posted yesterday.

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made the Top Ten this year, clocking in at No. 8.

Other women geek types–many from Silicon Valley–on the list include:

Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox (XRX) at No. 9; IBM (IBM) Global Sales and Distribution SVP Ginni Rometty at No. 11; Oracle (ORCL) President Safra Catz at No. 12; Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) Technology Solutions Group EVP Ann Livermore at No. 13; Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg at No. 22; Charlene Begley, president and CEO, GE (GE) Enterprise Solutions at No. 27; Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay (EBAY) Marketplaces at No. 40; HP CFO Cathie Lesjack at No. 42; and, finally, Google (GOOG) Search Products and User Experience VP Marissa Mayer at No. 44.

The conference associated with the Fortune issue, spearheaded by Pattie Sellers, will take place next week, starting Monday, in Carlsbad, Calif.

Fortune is part of Time Inc., which is owned by Time Warner (TWX).

Bartz, Sandberg and others will be interviewed onstage, along with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) chairman and CEO Warren Buffett.

Will BoomTown be in attendance, with my trusty Flip digital video at the ready? Yes, indeedy, so the lady geeks should beware–and I am talking to you, Sandberg!

Until then, here’s a cable television interview Bartz did today on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” Clocking in at almost 12 minutes, it’s classic Carol, with sassy catchphrases and jokes about being a really tough lady, but with little new news–except for her saying she would have sold to Microsoft (MSFT) when it was offering $33 a share way back when, because she is not “stupid.”

Indeed not.

Here’s the video:

When Time Warner reports its second-quarter earnings tomorrow morning, before the markets open, most Wall Street analysts are not expecting much from the media giant, as it continues to slog toward a rejiggering of itself.

Time Warner (TWX)–which owns assets like the Warner Bros. movie studio, the AOL online unit, the HBO and Turner cable television networks and Time Inc. magazines–is expected to earn 37 cents per share, compared to 72 cents a year ago, according to a poll of analysts from Thomson Reuters (TRIN).

Revenue is expected to be $6.97 billion, down from $11.56 billion in the same quarter last year. This drop is mostly due to the March spinoff of its cable unit, Time Warner Cable.

With movies like “The Hangover” and the sixth in the series, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” doing well, there is some strength at Time Warner.

But the advertising market has been weak all over, which hits the company hard.

That’s why both AOL and the magazines are expected to keep up their drag on Time Warner’s financial prospects–at least until the November spinoff of the online unit.

Until then, most expect another miserable quarter from AOL advertising revenue. Sources noted that any turnaround won’t show till end of year at the earliest, due to the weak economy and a retooling of the company and its sales force.

That restructuring is not over, most agree, with expectations of more layoffs of some of its 7,000 employees coming. With the 100-day overview by new CEO Tim Armstrong now over, sources said, the staff size is likely to be adjusted accordingly.

Most also expect to see continued weakness at the long-suffering Time Inc. magazine division.

People outside the company think that Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes will want to sell or spin off Time Inc. once AOL is done.

And people inside the company talk about the fact that Time has some 125 titles, although most of the revenue and profit only come from a few titles, such as People, Sports Illustrated and Time.

According to sources at the magazine division, talk of a new round of layoffs has also been also circulating there of late.

[The t-shirt image courtesy of Zazzle.]

Microsoft is searching for a major executive to run its world-wide online sales, said several sources close to the situation, even as talks with Yahoo about a deal to partner in its search and display advertising businesses continue.

“They need to find a way to make money in display,” said one source close to the situation. “Or, I guess, find a way to not lose quite so much.”

The software giant has been trying to build its online business for many years now, spending a lot of money and not getting very much traction.

In its recent quarterly results, in fact, Microsoft’s online services got hit badly, with a 14 percent decline in revenue from a year ago to $721 million. Losses doubled to $575 million.

Sources said Microsoft (MSFT)–which has hired headhunting firm Spencer Stuart to conduct the search–is looking for more execs to turbocharge the situation, with one criterion being that the person hired is “another ambassador to Madison Avenue.”

Last fall, it did that by hiring Time Inc. ad exec Robin Domeniconi to take over as the new VP, U.S., Microsoft Advertising.

That’s why the new sales candidate the company is looking for might only be for someone to lead Microsoft’s international ad sales, since the exec in charge of that business left in December as part of a mass of changes in the wake of the hiring of digital head Qi Lu.

Those changes included the departure of that exec, Global VP of Sales Bill Shaughnessy, as well as its top online ad sales exec, Brian McAndrews, and the rejiggering of its online sales unit.

In that switch, Microsoft said in a press release: “The field sales organizations in the Online Services Group will move to Microsoft’s centralized Sales, Marketing and Services Group led by chief operating officer Kevin Turner. This group, called Consumer & Online, will be led by Corporate Vice President Darren Huston and will include the Global Advertising Sales and Services organization, led by vice president Bill Shaughnessy.”

The move to centralize, according to sources, has been controversial within the company, since it means all sales are being lumped into one megagroup.

That could all change dramatically again if there is any success in the talks Microsoft has been having with Yahoo (YHOO) about outsourcing its online display sales to the Internet giant. The pair have been discussing partnering over search and advertising.

While such a deal might not happen–Yahoo has been especially reticent to separate its search and display businesses–the two sides have been discussing several scenarios in a bid to compete with online giant Google (GOOG).

Among the latest ideas is one in which Yahoo would take over both search and display advertising sales and Microsoft would run the tech behind the scenes.

Such a deal would be a major shift for both companies in their business focus and would also tether them together.

More moving of the chairs at AOL’s Platform-A.

The Time Warner (TWX) online unit will announce today that Mark Ellis has been promoted to EVP of sales at the advertising division.

He will lead Platform-A’s digital ad sales, sources said, including premium efforts at AOL’s MediaGlow content unit and for its third-party ad network.

It is all part of extensive management reorganization being done by Platform-A President Greg Coleman, former sales head at Yahoo (YHOO).

New CEO and Chairman Tim Armstrong started yesterday and told staff in a memo that even more change was coming, as part of a 100-day effort to evaluate how to revive the online company.

Ellis has been at AOL for a while, most recently as SVP of vertical and product sales. Previously, he worked at sports marketing company IMG, at Quokka Sports, a sports Web site and at Time Inc. as publisher of Time Inc. New Media.

Here’s a joke an exec at AOL recently sent me:

Q: How many Yahoo and AOL dealmakers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: None–you don’t need light if you’re never going to sign a merger agreement.

Ahahahaha. Ha.

Well, not really.

Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes certainly was not laughing much Wednesday, discussing the options for the media giant’s long troubled online unit at a UBS investor conference.

Among the gems from Bewkes, according to paidContent: “I’d like to get it resolved, meaning clear…so AOL can be seen and valued…. We need to do it fairly soon and we’ve been working hard on it.”

Calling AOL what it is–a third-place player in the portal sector–Bewkes acknowledged the obvious, that it’s a tough road in all sorts of ways, especially in the all-important advertising market, “even though some excellent work is being done on cost cuts, programming and traffic.”

Indeed, especially compared to its erstwhile suitor Yahoo, AOL execs have been toiling mightily to cut while also innovating.

Earlier this week, for example, AOL unveiled interesting changes to its social-networking and communications assets.

But those efforts might be just spitting into the wind, of course, with no end in sight, as the company struggles to differentiate itself from the pack.

And while Bewkes mentioned alternatives at the UBS event–including with Google and Microsoft, as well as Yahoo and a possible spinoff of AOL–he still used a lot of mights and might-nots in his talk.

But sources close to the situation said Time Warner was actually very seriously looking at a variety of configurations to sell off pieces of AOL.

AOL’s owner, especially Bewkes, sources said, has become weary of all the uncertainty and lack of ability to complete a deal with Yahoo (YHOO), after months of trying, especially since Yahoo is still without a CEO and has just this week undergone wrenching layoffs.

“Yahoo has trouble making decisions in the good times, so you can imagine how it is now,” said one source.

So, according to people with knowledge of the situation, new ideas center around selling off the communications and advertising parts of AOL, as well as its access business (which has been long expected).

Obvious buyers for the communications unit, now called the Peoples Network, would be both Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), which already owns five percent of the entire AOL unit.

The same is true for the advertising arm, now called Platform-A, which is perhaps AOL’s most lucrative asset.

But owning and running the lower-margin business, it is thought, is going to get increasingly hard as Microsoft and Google go for big scale.

That leaves the content properties, some of which are among the most trafficked on the Web, which could stay with Time Warner, either as a separate unit or as part of Time Inc.

The premium ad sales for the content could still be sold by using internal resources.

If that is done, it is even possible that Time Warner would retire the somewhat tired AOL brand name.

“We’re looking at all sorts of ways to make the most of this asset,” said one source. “After all, we can’t just wait for Yahoo to figure out what it wants to do.”

Indeed, it cannot.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Time Inc., the largest magazine company in the world, is laying off hundreds and reorganizing itself drastically, due to tough economic conditions, especially in advertising, as well as the more inexorable diminishing of its business as readers move to the Web.

Time Inc. is a unit of Time Warner (TWX), as is the AOL online unit.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore penned the email memo to employees tonight. She tried to tout gains in its digital business–part of the reason for the reorg is to move more of its content to Web platforms–noting 26 million people visit its Time Inc. sites monthly.

Which is, well, still not as big as it should be.

Moore, as well as Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, was interviewed by me onstage at two different D: All Things Digital conferences, where the challenges facing the magazine business were discussed by both.

Those challenges, obviously, continue.

Both videos are below.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore at D5, May 2007:

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes at D6, May 2008 (Part 4 of 4):

And here’s the entire Moore memo on the layoffs and reorg:

From: Moore, Ann – Executive Administration
Sent: Tue Oct 28 18:00:37 2008
Subject: Staff Announcement

October 28, 2008

To: Time Inc. Employees
From: Ann Moore
Re: Staff Announcement

As all of you are aware, industry conditions have been challenging due to the financial crisis, which has produced sharp decreases in advertising spending. This is expected to continue through most of 2009.

It’s important that we at Time Inc. react quickly to this new reality in order to maintain our financial strength, build our market position, and sharpen our ability to bounce back at the first signs of economic recovery. All the while we must continue to give our readers and audience the high quality editorial products they have come to expect from our publications and websites.

This is a challenge, unlike any we’ve seen before. And after much careful study and consultation with many of you who run our businesses, I have concluded that it is no longer possible to operate our company with the same decentralized management structure that served us so well during our many years of sustained growth.

So, effective tomorrow, we are going to implement a much more centralized management structure, organized into three business units that will group together titles that share similar audiences, advertisers, and the talents and skills of their staffs. The goal is to enable our company to move faster, go to market smarter, save significant costs, and employ our editorial resources more efficiently.

In broad strokes, here is how it will work:

Business Units. Time Inc.’s 24 U.S. magazines and companion web sites will be grouped into three business units, each reporting to a senior corporate executive. Each unit will have a similar structure that will include four key executives to direct the ad sales, digital business, financial and editorial efforts across that group. One of the most significant centralizing features of this new structure is that each of the three units will have one General Manager, responsible for all budgeting in the unit, who will report directly to Time Inc. EVP and CFO Howard Averill, with a dotted line to their respective senior operating executive.

The three Business Units will consist of:

* News: the existing print and digital properties in the TIME group, the Fortune|Money group, and the Sports Illustrated group, as well as Life.com and GEE. John Squires, EVP Time Inc. will manage the News Business Unit.
* Style and Entertainment: the existing print and digital properties in the PEOPLE group, InStyle, Entertainment Weekly, and Essence. I will act as the EVP for this group so the Style and Entertainment Business Unit will report to me.
* Lifestyle: the existing print and digital properties of Real Simple, This Old House, All You, Southern Living, Cooking Light, Sunset, Health, Cottage Living, Coastal Living, and Southern Accents, along with MyRecipes.com and MyHomeIdeas.com. Sylvia Auton, EVP Time Inc. will manage the Lifestyle Business Unit, while also retaining responsibility for IPC Media.

Editorial. John Huey continues as Time Inc.’s Editor-in-Chief, overseeing the News Business Unit Managing Editors and Martha Nelson, the Managing Editor of the Style and Entertainment Business Unit. In editorial alone we have seen three recent examples of how this sharing across titles can work to our benefit. During the summer Olympics, Sports Illustrated set up a system to supply Time.com with a fantastic array of photos from the games; in Europe and Asia, FORTUNE and TIME already are sharing correspondents; and, of course, the most visible example was the recent TIME cover story on the economy written by FORTUNE managing editor Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan. In the new structure we will see much more of this kind of cooperation.

Time Inc. Advertising Sales and Marketing. Given the difficult ad sales environment, it is critical that all of our brands work together to efficiently and effectively offer advertisers the solutions they need. For this reason, we are creating Time Inc. Advertising Sales and Marketing, a group that will be charged with setting and executing corporate ad sales strategy along with the ad sales head for each business unit. Stephanie George will become President of Time Inc. Advertising Sales and Marketing and will remain a Time Inc. EVP. She will also remain on the Board of American Express Publishing.

Time Inc. Consumer Marketing and Sales. Consumer Marketing and Sales will be run by Brian Wolfe, who has been promoted to EVP and will report directly to me. All Consumer Marketing and Sales activities will be centralized under Brian. This department will be responsible for circulation net income across all U.S. Magazines, as well as Synapse, QSP, Time Warner Retail, Time Customer Service, and TW4, Time Inc.’s international fulfillment operation.

Everyone in the Consumer Marketing organization should be proud of their accomplishments in this difficult environment–some of our largest newsstand titles are having record years and we are seeing strong circulation net income results across the company. These organizational changes, along with the recent acquisition of QSP and the incorporation of Synapse into Time Inc. Consumer Marketing and Sales, will give Brian and his team the ability to continue this momentum by making the best decisions for the company as a whole, and making them quickly and definitively.

Finally, I’m pleased to announce the promotions of Kerry Bessey and Maurice Edelson to EVP, Time Inc.

Time Inc. Senior Management along with the Business Unit leaders are working on restructuring within each group, and will announce further changes in the coming weeks. While the broader economy and the advertising industry both continue to present challenges, I know we can weather this storm and emerge as an even stronger company when the economy begins to recover. We are still a very profitable company. Our cash flow is strong. We have made tremendous progress with our digital business. Each month, more than 26 million people visit Time Inc. websites. We know our consumers continue to value our magazines and websites. We have the top brands in all the categories where we publish and we’re finding exciting new ways to expand our titles beyond the printed page and the web. The importance of fact-based journalism has never been clearer given the many serious issues facing the world and our core competency, trusted editing skills, has never been more needed than in this time of too much information.

I’d like to thank you all for your continued hard work.

A.M.

Oh, there had to be much, much gnashing of teeth in the corporate offices of the Time Warner Center in New York yesterday with news of the sale of DailyCandy to Comcast for $125 million.

Why?

Maybe because that tasty payment is going right into the hands of Bob Pittman’s Pilot Group Ventures, which bought the fashion and shopping newsletter business for $3 million in 2003.

Longtime media exec Pittman was the former star AOLer, whose nickname was Bob “Pitchman” for his smooth-as-silk selling and even more marked spinning skills.

But the Web 1.0 supernova fell quickly to earth, after the online service merged with Time Warner (TWX) in early 2001, in what is now considered one of the more significant world-class corporate disasters.

After being tossed out of AOL Time Warner in mid-2002, Pittman (pictured here), along with AOL head Steve Case, was blamed for the stock decline and other woes at the media giant by the Time Warner side, whose deep bitterness toward him has never really faded away.

Now, with Time Warner trying to make a deal to sell the AOL unit for up to $10 billion to Yahoo or Microsoft–despite it being valued at $20 billion only a few years ago–Pittman’s small but impressive score has got to grate.

“I have been associated with the start-up, turnaround or acceleration of many companies and major brands, and rarely have I seen the kind of creativity, commitment and passion I’ve seen day in and day out at DailyCandy,” said Pittman in a letter to DailyCandy staff yesterday about the sale. “And the results speak for themselves: Since we made our investment in 2003, subscriptions have grown from just over 200,000 to over 2.5 million.”

In the letter, Pittman said the company’s EBITDA was over $10 million this year on revenues of $25 million.

This is certainly different from the situation almost exactly six years ago when Pittman was driven out of the then-named AOL Time Warner on the proverbial rail.

If you want a taste of those once-grim times for Pittman, here is an excerpt from my book, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future,” which was published in 2003.

The section comes from Chapter Six, “Way, Way After the Goldrush,” as the deal imploded:

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE NO BUSINESS

But while Time Warnerites rejoiced in their hope that the merger turmoil was finally over, the company’s troubles wouldn’t leave the front pages for a long time to come.

We’ll see if that has changed at all, after Time Warner announces its second quarter earnings later today.

Ann Moore says Time Inc. really does get the Internet.

It is not as if the magazine giant has had a lot of choice in that matter, but the CEO of Time Inc. seems to embrace the inevitable with resolve and even excitement–which is rare in old-media circles still–in this interview.

By way of background, D: All Things Digital, the annual tech and media conference Walt Mossberg and I host, has been sold out with a long wait list every year we have put it on.

That has meant only a few hundred people can see the interviews and also demos we do live onstage with some of the tech and media industry’s most interesting and important players and products.

The lineups have included Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, as well as Eric Schmidt of Google, IAC’s Barry Diller, Meg Whitman of eBay, Cisco’s John Chambers and many others.

And we’ve demoed stuff like the Treo when it first came out, as well as digital toilets, Wi-Fi phones and much more.

We usually post the photos and videos of the interviews and demos six or more months after they take place on a separate conference site. This year, our Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski liveblogged D5 and also posted video highlights from all of the sessions immediately on our newly launched site here.

Now, we are posting videos of every session of the 2007 conference here, in full, and we have made all our photo galleries, hosted by SmugMug and mostly shot by our fabulous Asa Mathat, public too. You can also access our videos via the site’s master player here.

Every day, I am going to highlight a different interview or demo from the conference.

Today, Moore gets the focus:

The interviews featured are with famed filmmaker George Lucas, CBS CEO Les Moonves, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman and a solo interview with Apple legend Steve Jobs.

Here’s the video I did for the tab on the conference, focusing on the strides made by traditional media in dealing with the Web and its impact.

In related D news, our official conference page has now been relocated to this site from its old one, and you can now access it here. You can get all sorts of information, as well as pictures and videos from the first through the fourth D conferences.

We will not be opening registration for D6, which will take place May 27 to 29, 2008, until the fall, although Walt and I are already thinking about next year’s program.

Full pictures and video for D5 will be up on this site soon, first for conference attendees and then for everyone. Until then, check out our highlights of the conference with blogs, video and pictures here.

First, the news that Owen Thomas, who writes the most excellent blog Beta for Business 2.0 magazine’s Web site, where he has worked in a variety of reporting and editing jobs, will take over as lead writer and editor of Gawker Media’s Valleywag. His last job at Business 2.0 was as online editor for the Time Inc. title.

It’s an interesting move by Gawker Media, the gossipy blog network that is Valleywag’s parent company, and its publisher Nick Denton, to hire a more experienced and essentially mainstream reporter like Thomas, who has deep sources in the Silicon Valley community and is well respected.

Denton has actually been writing the blog about the business and often personal foibles of Silicon Valley since November, when he sacked its first editor, Nick Douglas. At the time, Gawker execs made it clear that the young and green editor was too inexperienced and not authoritative enough (although Douglas still writes posts regularly for Valleywag).

But traffic to Valleywag has tripled to 1.5 million monthly page views under Denton, who covered the Valley in the late 1990s for the Financial Times and who was well described by venture capitalist Fred Wilson as an “evil genius.”

This is due to the fact that he has focused more on deals and business and less on the–let’s be honest, mostly dull–personal lives of players in the tech sector. Denton has broken a number of juicy stories, as well as providing up-to-the-minute coverage of a missing python at Google’s New York headquarters.

But one of his biggest misses, he wrote me in an email, was being wrong twice in his ongoing effort to determine the identity of Fake Steve Jobs–including incorrectly naming AllThingsD.com’s Digital Daily evil genius John Paczkowski as the mystery writer of “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs.”

Interestingly, it was Thomas who managed to get FSJ to send him this picture as part of a recent poll on Business 2.0’s Web site.

“The coverage of Silicon Valley has been a labor of love, and hate. It would have been hard to give up Valleywag to just anybody,” wrote Denton to me. “Owen Thomas is the first person I ever approached about the job. And I hope he’s the last.”

And, this past weekend, I let New York Times reporter Matt Richtel use my home to throw a book party for his first novel called “Hooked: A Thriller About Love and Other Addictions,” which officially debuts this week.

The book, which is set in the Silicon Valley environs and has a heavy digital bent complete with evil-genius venture capitalists, begins with an explosion in a San Francisco cafe and never stops from there. “Hooked” is getting excellent customer reviews on Amazon, and Richtel has a number of readings around the Bay area and elsewhere in coming weeks.

So here is a short movie I did at the party, talking to Matt, as well as Wired writer Fred Vogelstein and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, about Matt and other stuff.

“We could create such a currency,” said Bewkes at an investment conference, noting that AOL did not have the heft that other players like Yahoo and Google did, because it did not stand alone as a pure-play Web firm. “We certainly contemplated doing that.”

Besides Bewkes’s stating of the obviously obvious, it is a contemplation that is, as the Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams song goes, too much, too little, too late. Here’s why:

TOO MUCH: Face it, Time Warner’s Hamlet act over what to do with AOL is of the most peculiar variety, given that it has been going on since the forces of Time Warner seized back the company from the interlopers from AOL more than four years ago, after what was billed as the deal of the new century turned out to be more like a steal.

But instead of forging ahead after they regained control and doubling down on the company’s digital bets right after the first Internet bubble burst, the pain and rage caused by the merger debacle caused the company to maintain a vise grip on AOL that allowed its power and influence to wither rather than flourish as the Web’s prospects brightened again.

Just using MySpace, which burst on the scene in the last two years, as an example: It took user-generated content, social networking and communications tools and parlayed them into one of the biggest sites on the Internet today. Sadly, each one of those qualities that allowed MySpace to soar were once the major elements of AOL and, I dare say, where such online practices were invented.

TOO LITTLE: OK, fine, you maybe want to spin it out? Well, no one I have interviewed as potential investors or even buyers wants to do that if Time Warner holds onto too big a stake in the venture. That desire not to lose control of AOL by Time Warner is problematic for anyone considering making a big bet with the service, which–though declining in relevance and sheer power–is still one of the bigger and most well-known brands on the Web.

If Time Warner is serious about giving AOL the wings it needs to fly, it has to not clip them in the process and not keep it too close to the nest. As Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore noted in an interview at D5 last week, its magazine sites are doing a lot better since they seized control of their own destiny and are making choices based on individual needs and consumer desire.

AOL needs to be able to act as if it is not beholden to anyone, except its customers. One of its greatest recent successes, TMZ.com (which I did a post about here), a gossip site, is in direct competition with Time Inc.’s People.com site. I say, bring a lot more of that on.

TOO LATE: Would that it could. While waiting, competitors have snapped up all the good start-ups that companies like AOL need to keep innovating. Luckily, AOL managed to get the most excellent Advertising.com, but it never got its hands on the really good stuff like Flickr, for example, and time is not on its side here.

And the more interesting small companies AOL has bought, like Userplane, maker of really terrific communication apps for Web sites, seem to languish within the company (though this is a problem not particular to AOL).

While I am sure to irk Time Warner with a quote from the ultimate Ghost of Disastrous Mergers Past, former AOL Time Warner (when it was called that) Chairman Steve Case said it best when he was interviewed from the stage at D5 last week, too.

I asked him about AOL’s prospects and his message was on point, as painful as it might be for Time Warner execs to hear from such a source:

“I am disappointed that 10 years ago we were kind of in the catbird seat and, for a variety of reasons, [AOL]’s lost some of that momentum,” he said. “It’s still a major force … but it is certainly not the epicenter of the industry that it was once before.”

It surely is not, and no amount of Wall Street daydreaming can fix that.

So here’s one of my movies to show you how we prepare for the annual conference, which is highlighted this year by a joint interview with Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs, the twin icons of the tech industry.

We’ll kick off the conference tomorrow night with an interview with Sen. John McCain, who is in the race to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States. We will talk to him about that, as well as the war in Iraq, but also hope to discuss a plethora of digital issues with him. McCain is one of the few politicians who knows a thing or two about the media, telecom and Web sectors.

Other interviewees on Wednesday and Thursday include: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; CBS CEO Les Moonves; News Corp. President Peter Chernin; Cisco CEO John Chambers; former AOL CEO Steve Case, who will talk about his new company, Revolution; famed director and producer George Lucas; Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore; Google CEO Eric Schmidt; YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley; Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom; and space tourist (and former Microsoft exec) Charles Simonyi.

We’ll also have demos from tech players like Palm legend Jeff Hawkins and others. And we are also excited to have singer/songwriter Jill Sobule, who will perform several times throughout.

We’ll have full coverage of D5 on our site, starting tomorrow night, including liveblogging by Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski, pictures, video excerpts and more.