Over the last year, as he has sought to revive the flagging fortunes of Yahoo, CEO and Co-Founder Jerry Yang has ferreted himself away from the spotlight and has seldom made himself available to talk to investors or reporters about what he has been up to.

I dubbed it the “cave” strategy, mostly because that’s what many around Yahoo called it. Since Yang really didn’t have anything good to say about the troubled Internet giant, he didn’t say anything at all.

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Yes, indeedy, this is about as insider as you get in Silicon Valley. But we are just addled enough by all the spiked eggnog we drank this weekend to think you might be interested in this video we did at a variety of industry holiday parties BoomTown attended.
They include a stop at angel investor Ron [...]

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Don’t miss this Wall Street Journal story on finding charity information on the Web as you are contemplating your annual giving.
Money quote: “Over the past couple of years, the nonprofit watchdogs that help donors have added more information to their sites, and they’ve increased the number of organizations they follow. Moreover, information about thousands of [...]

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The Wall Street Journal gave a big hello to its new owner, Rupert Murdoch, who takes over Dow Jones (owner of this site) today, by publishing this tough piece also today on the disaster of News Corp.’s investment in Gemstar-TV Guide International.
It comes from breakingviews, an online financial commentary Web site that the news organization [...]

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Despite the progress of digital video recording pioneer TiVo in reviving its business, the goal of getting Internet programming on your television set for it and many other players is still an uphill battle, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield in an article yesterday.

Why? Um, it’s still a minefield out there for the [...]

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You might have missed this story from The Wall Street Journal over the weekend by William M. Bulkeley about criminals who are getting hoisted on their own digital petard.

Literally, in fact, by taking pictures of their crimes on devices like cellphones and even posting them on the Web, thus proving their guilt. Apparently, you can [...]

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One of the nice things about having a blog is that I can mouth off on just about anything I want and include whatever I want too (such as, for example, shamelessly making videos of my kids in a fruitless attempt to try to cajole Yahoo’s Jerry Yang into having lunch with me).

Today, that [...]

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If you are a glutton for punishment, here is the entire video from the Public Relations Society of America’s Silicon Valley chapter’s annual “Media Influencer” dinner, held at the Computer History Museum last week.

BoomTown was one of the tech writers on the panel, which was talking about what the big trends in tech in 2007 [...]

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The rumors have been a-flyin’ recently about the reported talks between LinkedIn and News Corp.
Billing itself as the “professional” social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook, the LinkedIn service is squarely aimed at those with a task in mind from networking to recruiting to career advancement.
In many ways, it [...]

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Last night, the Public Relations Society of America’s Silicon Valley chapter held its annual “Media Influencer” dinner at the Computer History Museum, which featured a spate of tech journalists pitching a large room full of PR people about what’s hot in the sector.
Turning the tables this year–and apparently getting “honored” by the group–were: Victoria Barret [...]

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With all the holiday hubbub, don’t miss this great piece in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend by Steve Stecklow and James Bandler, which chronicles the bumpy road of the much-hyped $100 laptop project, spearheaded by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte.

Walt Mossberg and I have had Negroponte at two of our D conferences to talk about [...]

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Below is a video interview with Amazon’s majordomo Jeff Bezos conducted by The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg about the new $400 Kindle wireless electronic-book reader that the online retailer unveiled last week.
So far the reviews have been less than whelming–too clunky, too pricey, too wonky, to name a few of the complaints–but it’s interesting [...]

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Life under media mogul Rupert Murdoch will be full of surprises, at least.

Earlier this week, the News Corp. CEO and chairman said while in Australia that he is leaning toward making The Wall Street Journal’s fee-based Web site free, which appears to be getting some resistance from, well, the execs running the flagship newspaper.

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We owe entrepreneur Craig McCaw a lot for his efforts at bringing cellphones to the masses, and now he is working on WiMax, wireless access on a massive scale.
More ubiquitous wireless, pretty please, Craig (or anyone listening)! Now.
Here’s a link to a great front-page Wall Street Journal article on his efforts by Amol Sharma, as [...]

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So when, if ever, will there be a truly bona fide Internet hit?
And please, pretty please, it just can’t be “lonelygirl15″ (pictured below) and some clever music videos.

The lack of lasting and profitable professional content online is once again in sharp relief with the writers’ strike now taking place in Hollywood.
In a Wall Street Journal [...]

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