BoomTown is clearly losing a step in the summer doldrums and forgot to post this lovely movie that I did while in Jackson Hole, Wyo., last weekend for an event called the “Internet Cowboys Un-Conference.”

What’s an un-conference? Well, it was less organized, there were fly-fishing and elk nearby and it involved a whole lot of thinking big thoughts in the much bigger outdoors.

It was actually a very bracing time and here is a video I did interviewing some of the participants.

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BoomTown just got to Paris, as in France, to attend and moderate sessions for the third annual Le Web conference. Le Web is organized by Loïc and Geraldine Le Meur, with 1,500 people signed up to hear a range of Internet players, many of whom are from the U.S., tomorrow and Wednesday. Silicon Valley speakers include Marissa Mayer of Google, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Dan’l Lewin of Microsoft. And some interesting European execs include France Telecom Orange Chairman and CEO Didier Lombard and Jacques-Antoine Granjon, CEO and co-founder of a very interesting fashion sale site, Vente-Privee.com.

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Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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Germany’s Hubert Burda Media threw a big luncheon in Palo Alto yesterday, which was stuffed full with Silicon Valley types. It was hosted by the company’s Steffi Czerny and Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, as well as well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich, called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

So here’s the video!

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Tonight, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters had nearly identical stories, noting that Microsoft was interested in buying Yahoo’s search business, which–oh, we bloggers are so touchy when we don’t get even a smidgen of credit, aren’t we?–BoomTown speculated was just what the software giant was interested in yesterday.

To be fair, both Reuters’ and The Journal’s reports make such a plan by Microsoft even more definitive and both have interesting new details, which are intriguing.

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This week, I had lunch with one of the nicest young Web entrepreneurs around the scene, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.
We use a custom WordPress.com installation for this site, which has worked out well for us, and the start-up also hosts AllThingsD.com. We also got a very nice hoodie.
In all seriousness, the company started as an [...]

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Here’s a terrific shot of AllThingsD.com’s Walt Mossberg with well-known Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Vardi.
(Click on the image to make it larger.)

They’re onstage at an event called the Israel Business Conference, put on by an Israeli business publication called Globes.
Walt was interviewed by Vardi. At one point, he noted: “In 10 years, I believe that most [...]

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So, the Monaco Media Forum in Monte-Carlo kicked off last night with a dinner at the famed Hermitage Hotel on the Square Beaumarchais.
It was a fancy gold-leaf setting for the gathering of Silicon Valley and European digital media execs, investors and entrepreneurs, a kickoff to two days of discussion about the state of tech [...]

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