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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Since leaving Google several years ago, where he last worked on wireless spectrum issues, it’s hard to say exactly what role the digital jumping bean who is Chris Sacca plays.

He’s not an entrepreneur, although he seems to know all of them in Web 2.0 world and advises 18 start-ups. He’s no longer a big-company exec, although he was one and knows a lot of them too. He’s not a venture capitalist, although he is involved in a private equity firm and invests in a lot of the start-ups he advises, like the red-hot Twitter, and knows those guys too.

In any case, here’s my chat with the Silicon Valley gadfly, whom BoomTown has dubbed the Start-Up Whisperer.

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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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Actor Ashton Kutcher crossed the million-follower-on-Twitter line at 11:12 p.m. PDT, beating CNN.

Kutcher simply tweeted: “Victory is ours!!!!!!!!

The CNN cable news channel passed the million mark soon after, but was still second.

The race was getting close as midnight neared on the West Coast.

Not a real race, but a race of the Twits.

Kutcher vs. CNN was a race to get one million “followers,” those who sign up to receive a person’s or organization’s tweets on the hot microblogging service.

Now, I am worried about what Kutcher–whose Twitter handle is aplusk–will do with his one million minions. Order us all to play idiotic practical jokes on people? Rent Demi Moore movies, even the unwatchable ones (”G.I. Jane” anyone?), over and over? Get 1970s mullets?

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In this digital era’s version of “Spy Vs. Spy,” Microsoft and Google find themselves in yet another sharp-elbowed battle to be the one to strike some sort of commercial search deal or product partnership with Twitter, many sources with knowledge of the situation said, as they also jockey for position to evaluate the potential of the much-hyped microblogging start-up.

After last week’s explosive rumor that Google was in “late-stage” talks to acquire Twitter, which BoomTown reported was wildly premature, I set out to try to sort out exactly what was going on.

As I found out, there was a lot–mostly much talking related to possible product and distribution partnerships, centered around Google or Microsoft, as both struggle to gauge the importance of Twitter.

It’s a familiar roundelay for the two most powerful companies on the Web.

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Yesterday, the revenue-unencumbered microblogging service, Twitter, came up with ExecTweets, sponsored by Microsoft, as a way to bring in the simoleons.

Without diving into the deep specifics, suffice it to say, BoomTown is not exactly doing somersaults at the idea of following, say, what the fine execs at AIG are up to on a regular basis (Typical tweet: Taxing stolen taxpayer-funded bonuses?!? Where’s the outrage?).

Still, good for Twitter for at least pretending it actually cared about profits. In that spirit, here are some more ideas, one of which could finally bring Jennifer Aniston some much deserved happiness!

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BoomTown’s been just one week gone and yet another goofy, traffic-generating debate “erupts” in the blogosphere involving the usual suspects and the favored hyped Silicon Valley company of the moment, Twitter. The new bone being gnawed on is something I can hardly grasp the point of–some drivel argument about what constitutes the authority of a tweet. While tweet status would seem only important to, say, a Warner Bros. cartoon character like Sylvester, all I can think is: Who cares? That’s because the fact remains that Twitter is simply an unknown to most average people in a way other tech trends have not been.

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The prospect of no Steve Jobs keynote and Apple’s last year at IDG’s annual Macworld Conference & Expo is sure to do five things, none of which are pretty. An era is surely over, but what comes next is anyone’s guess.

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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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While the tech blogosphere fiddles away on navel-gazing stories–Who are the top tech bloggers? Do they Twitter to get to the top? Or do they FriendFeed? Do they feed friends while tweeting? More importantly, will there be chicken wings?–I’d advise anyone interested in the much more serious issue of making some money from Web 2.0 [...]

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