Lonely Planet, best known as a traditional travel guidebook publisher, is announcing a new U.S. head tomorrow, as it increasingly moves to reposition the company as much more of a “cross-media” platform.

John Boris–set to take over today as new managing director of Lonely Planet Americas, based at its Oakland, Calif., office–comes to the company from Zagat Survey, where he was the SVP of marketing and interactive.

Previous to that, Boris worked at 1-800 Flowers and Fresh Direct.

“I’m thrilled to be joining one of the world’s best-loved travel brands at such an exciting time, with Lonely Planet rapidly evolving as a cross-media travel player,” he said in a press release.

As the paid versus free content online debate gets louder over the next year, how well known brands like Lonely Planet–which has a strong reputation among consumers–handle the fallout will be more and more interesting to watch.

Indeed, in recent months, Lonely Planet has been escalating its digital content efforts, which was the initial promise when BBC Worldwide bought 75 percent of the Melbourne, Australia-based company for about $200 million in late 2007.

But the digitization of Lonely Planet’s business, as with many traditional media publishers like it, has been slow going, with 75 percent of its revenue still in print.

While that business remains profitable, the breakdown between print and digital will be changing sooner than later, since digital is where much of the growth is coming from, said CEO Matt Goldberg to me over a recent dinner in San Francisco.

Goldberg–who came to Lonely Planet early this year from Dow Jones, where he was SVP of digital strategy and operations, including for WSJ.com–noted that Lonely Planet’s digital businesses have doubled their revenues to $20 million this year via premium pricing and advertising.

Besides the obvious use of Twitter and Facebook, Goldberg flagged a number of the more promising and innovative digital initiatives now at work at Lonely Planet, especially in its key U.S. market.

They include:

* Leveraging the 700,000 registered members of Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree community,

* The announcement this week of putting all or part of 600 of its travel guides on the international release of the Amazon (AMZN) Kindle e-reader.

* Work on collaborative trip planning for its “Trippy” gadget, as part of the Google Wave beta launched last week.

* A compass application for Google (GOOG) Android handsets that make use of augmented reality technology to highlight points of interest in cities. As Goldberg described it in an email, travelers will be able to “pan a city destination using the video on their handset and see Lonely Planet recommendations (points of interest from our City Guides) as virtual sticky notes above real live points of interest.”

* Over 500,000 downloads from around 70 premium-priced apps on the iPhone from Apple (AAPL), as well as various location-based guide apps for Nokia (NOK) and BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM).

* Travel music collections featured on Spotify and other online music services.

Goldberg highlighted other interesting ideas, such as an online travel video contest and even a “hack” day in Australia recently, which will be followed by one in the U.S. in the late winter.

While not all of it is going to work, this kind of endless experimentation at Lonely Planet is probably the right way to keep figuring out how to deal with the seismic media shifts that show no sign of abating.

Here’s the classic stylings of Apple’s Steve Jobs, showing off the iPhone 3G, from the keynote today at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Yes, those are actual oohs and ahs from the audience, which includes a massive passel of press, as if Jobs was showing them the secret to eternal happiness (which is, by the way, not a new iPhone, but a dozen tasty donuts).

Here’s the video from MarketWatch on WSJ.com:

Surface actually got a demo at our D5 conference last May, but BoomTown has been partial to this very funny video spoof on the “big-assed table”:

The shaggy Brett Erlich perfectly reviews the sites for the Web 2.0 crowd, making fun of WSJ.com’s soothing video intro music, and the online video stars on Forbes and Fortune (one of whom, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer is an old classmate of mine, in fact).

The best bit is his take on the “Information Highway Traffic Jam” at the end among all us MSM types, driving like teens gone wild on the digital freeway.

Here’s the video:

Exciting? Not!

Good thing Facebook and Slide got all that cash!

With a lot of companies reporting soon, here’s a video from WSJ.com to help you sort it all out:

One looks at the newfound fervor in India for Lord Balaji (pictured here), an incarnation of the Hindu Lord Vishnu, because of his apparent pull in getting adherents visas to the U.S. and other Western countries. Well, that’s one way to win an H-1B.

Another is a piece about investor Peter Thiel, who made the first significant investment in Facebook, and his maverick theories on how venture capitalism has to change. That includes letting entrepreneurs cash out early–praise the Lord and pass the Porsches!

(If you want to hear Thiel in action, see below the video interview BoomTown did months ago, in which he discusses his approach. And, yes, I know I say “right” too much.)

Favorite quote when Jordan asks a trucker if he has a laptop and is misheard: “Lap Dancer? No, I’m married.”

It’s certainly a long way from CB radio–10-4, good buddy.

Today, that means being able to give credit where credit is surely due. In this case, being able to thank L. Gordon Crovitz (pictured here), the outgoing publisher of The Wall Street Journal, for all he has done for both Walt Mossberg and me and all he has done for our little Dow Jones enterprises–this Web site, AllThingsD.com and our annual conference, D: All Things Digital.

Today, with the change in leadership due to the purchase of Dow Jones by News Corp., it was announced that Crovitz is leaving the company as a manager next week, although he will apparently be writing a column on media. He had run the company’s consumer media group, including the flagship Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, Barron’s and Barron’s Online, MarketWatch and the other properties.

And also its most outlying outpost, AllThingsD.com and our D conference.

Simply put, without Crovitz’s unstinting support, along with that of former Managing Editor Paul Steiger and a few others, we would never have been able to mount this clearly entrepreneurial effort within the confines of a traditional media company.

While the image of a mainstream media mandarin is a mutated creature–kind of a slow-moving turtle combined with a very shy ostrich whose head resides permanently in the sand–Crovitz was the key executive at Dow Jones who made it possible for us to push forward unusual new things like the conference and the site.

We had started the successful conference before he got the job as publisher, but Crovitz always backed us as we wanted to try new things. And he did not blink when we brought the idea of a separately run Web site to him, related to it.

Our pitch wasn’t exactly smooth or even appealing–we told him to think of us like we were the “crazy cousins” at Dow Jones, trying all sorts of new experiments in online media and without a committee of bureaucrats to muck up the process.

Still, Crovitz said yes and yes again, over and over. This is no small thing, especially against a backdrop of a mainstream-media world beset by frightening change. But Crovitz embraced and welcomed that digital shift.

More importantly, he–and we are in his debt for this–fully understood the need for change in all its forms, as long as we adhered to what makes Dow Jones great–high standards and ethics and great reporting.

Now the man who started his career at Dow Jones in 1980 as a summer intern writing editorials for The Wall Street Journal–he won a Gerald Loeb Award for business commentary in 1990–will head on out, to be replaced by a News Corp. exec and Times of London editor Robert Thomson (Bob! Bobby! Call! Write! We’re not that crazy!).

So, for all you have done for us, Gordon, Walt and I thank you and wish you well on your next endeavor. (And, if you really want to help us more, write a blog for us and make it snappy!)

Here’s the video:

Thus, we were unprepared for the plethora of people inquiring about wanting to join a real one. Sadly, this is not to be, as we’ve got a lot of other priorities around here at AllThingsD.

Nonetheless, that did not stop our friends over at Geek Culture from celebrating AllThingsWalt with this nice medallion, pictured here, which we make available free to all who want to print it out, cut around the edges and create a lovely button to wear proudly at all tech events of note.