Since it was tacked onto the slasher movie, “Sorority Row,” which opened this weekend, many have been posting the brand new trailer for “New Moon.”

The second installment of the “Twilight” vampire series debuts Nov. 20, natch!

And, actually, while the first film left me in a mild stupor–BoomTown is so not the demographic for the film–this one looks pretty good because it seems chock full of the Olympic broodiness of Kristen Stewart (who is also filming a biopic about Joan Jett, which completely redeems her in my book).

Here’s one of the many video trailers, one of which already had 2,732 comments on Google (GOOG) video site YouTube since it was posted just yesterday, most of which are text versions of teen girls screaming:

And here are the first two trailers, released earlier this summer:

One of the great things about the Internet is the immediacy in getting relevant information, especially via video.

Such has been the case with the fires that have been raging around Los Angeles of late, riveting images of which have proliferated around the Web, posted by professionals and amateurs alike.

Having just spent a week in the area, BoomTown can attest to the surrealness of driving around the city with scary fires clearly visible on the hills nearby. While the fires are now starting to come under control, the videos of them are still burning hot.

To get a taste of it, check out this amazing real-time video of one of the fires, taken last week and posted on YouTube–it is a time-lapse format, which a lot of people are doing:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave what he just had to know would be a much quoted comment to the Nikkei today, explicitly saying that the company had “begun seriously looking into acquisitions again.”

Music to the beleaguered mergers and acquisitions market, to be sure, especially after a recent uptick from other big companies pulling out their wallets again as the impact of the econalypse subsides.

According to sources, Google (GOOG) is working on at least a half-dozen acquisition deals, most of which are small start-ups in the online advertising and cloud computing arenas.

That would be welcome news for many.

That’s because, as The Wall Street Journal noted in a piece today, “August was shaping up to be the worst month for deal making since 1995, according to data provider Dealogic” (see the chart).

That was, until Disney (DIS) bought Marvel for $4 billion, in a deal announced Monday.

Then yesterday, eBay (EBAY) traded 65 percent of its Skype Internet telephony unit to a group of free-spending private investors, led by Silver Lake Partners, for $1.9 billion.

While eye-popping numbers like that make dealmakers smile, most think it is in the spate of smaller venture-backed companies that more of the action will happen, with big companies like Google, Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL) and even Yahoo (YHOO) as predators.

Many of these were funded in the Web 2.0 boom and have done well enough, but are figuring out that a link with a larger fish will likely make for a better outcome, along with filling in tech and product gaps at the giants.

Think about Facebook’s $50 million acquisition of social networking site FriendFeed recently and you have the right idea.

According to more than a half-dozen Silicon Valley VCs I have spoken to this week, this is the likeliest kind of exit for a large group of their portfolio companies.

Thus, they are putting on their finest and placing themselves on display in the store window, offering talent and innovation.

“We all realize that a lot of these companies are not going to be independent, so we’re all trying to figure out where they best fit in,” said one VC. “We essentially did business development for a lot of the large companies.”

Thus, here are some companies whose names have been bandied about of late by M&A types who say they are more likely candidates for sale:

Veoh, the Web video portal that MediaMemo wrote about in July, has reportedly been searching for a home for a while now as it struggles in a costly space dominated by giants like YouTube and Hulu.

That goes for many other similar video efforts, such as Joost, Metacafe and Dailymotion, all of which have been trying to gain traction.

There is also likely to be a shakeout in the gaming and “guy” content space, which has also seen a lot of funding in the last several years and less monetary success.

Some possible names here include: Xfire, a gaming instant-messaging company Viacom (VIA) bought a couple years ago for $100 million; Giant Realm, a 20-something guy site funded by Comcast (CMCSA) and others; and UGO, Hearst’s version of a 20-something guy site.

Probably, given the need to focus on monetization, the most active M&A space will be in online advertising.

Sources said Google, for example, has been interested in companies such as Teracent, a dynamic ad-serving and optimization start-up in San Mateo.

There are lots of names in this general arena to pick from, from Tumri to Quantcast to AdMob to the Rubicon Project, not all of which are for sale, but might be for the right price.

Lastly, there is the smart phone and telecom space, where there might be some of the bigger deals.

While Palm (PALM) has been trying mightily to gain traction with its Pre offering, many think that if it does not go as well as hoped, the company will be an acquisition target eventually for giant companies like Nokia (NOK).

While many think Microsoft could also be a buyer of Palm, given the lackluster performance of its Windows Mobile devices, it might be more attuned to a much bigger catch: Research in Motion (RIMM) and its business-oriented BlackBerry empire.

Such a massive acquisition–most of those I bounced that idea off agreed–would be an uphill battle, but it would be perhaps the best fish story ever.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

While John Hughes has almost nothing to do with the Internet, BoomTown–who is of a certain age–was saddened to hear about the premature passing of this director supreme of suburban teen angst movies of the 1980s.

He died yesterday of a heart attack at 59 years old.

His hit films included “The Breakfast Club,” “Sixteen Candles” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” He wrote “The Breakfast Club” and “Sixteen Candles,” as well as “Pretty in Pink,” “Home Alone,” “Some Kind of Wonderful” (I heart Watts) and tons of others.

In other words, the creator of the infamous “Brat Pack.”

Here are two movie clips to enjoy on this slooooow Friday in August, from Hulu, and a terrific montage video from YouTube, which make me feel–almost–young again.

And here is a link to a fascinating blog post about someone who, oddly enough, was Hughes’s pen pal.

The Breakfast Club:

Sixteen Candles:

Hughes Montage:

Oh, who doesn’t just love, love, love the two latest viral videos to hit the Web?

One, called “United Breaks Guitars,” is a very funny music video about an experience singer Dave Carroll had when the airline murdered his guitar and then refused to say sorry.

It has had close to 4.7 million views on YouTube.

The other, even better, is a joyful wedding dance of Minnesotans Jill and Kevin, along with their many grooms and bridesmaids, all of whom hilariously boogeyed down the aisle.

Current count: 17.1 million views.

While that’s all well and good, like a lot of these kinds of viral phenoms, neither is likely to go the distance in economic rewards.

While Google (GOOG), owner of YouTube, has been making noise about the wedding video causing a spike in sales of Chris Brown’s “Forever,” which is the music the wedding party shimmies to, this kind of one-off is not really a sustainable way to make video a true financial windfall.

And herein lies the problem–the Internet is most excellent at surfacing and distributing these delightful videos, but it still is not so good at revealing an organized, massive way they will all pay off.

That’s because much of it relies on buzz, which is simply unguessable.

And, even though more advertising efforts are being aimed at premium content on sites like Hulu, the revenue still remains much smaller than costs.

Consider the Susan Boyle sensation, which can doubtlessly be called 2009’s Web powerhouse. The video of her astonishing rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Miserables” on the television show, “Britain’s Got Talent,” was a huge hit.

So far, the show’s YouTube post alone has 75.2 million views, but–due to a number of reasons–it did not make such sensational amounts of money.

Obviously, as consumers shift more and more time to watching Internet video, advertising allocations will be shifted too.

And, with media moguls like News Corp. (NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch making copious noise about charging for content, it’s likely the most popular videos might begin to get some lucrative gating at some point.

But for delightful hits like the wedding dance or “United Breaks Guitars,” it will be interesting to see if they ever become more than watercooler wonders.

In any case, please enjoy the videos gratis!

Jill & Kevin:

United Breaks Guitars:

Susan Boyle:

How much should you ponder this amazing video from an upcoming new documentary series by Ken Burns–titled “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea”–on America’s national parks system?

Muchly much, as the national parks have indeed been one of this country’s most amazing gifts to itself.

Set to air on PBS on September 27, the creators stuck a video clip that is almost 27 minutes long on YouTube and on the series’ own really nice Web site, which is a pretty terrific thing to do.

The real series is 12 hours long and in six parts, directed by the still-elfish Burns and co-produced with Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the script.

As they describe it, the series “is the story of an idea as uniquely American as the Declaration of Independence and just as radical: that the most special places in the nation should be preserved, not for royalty or the rich, but for everyone.”

After having recently just visited the wonder that is Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which is much featured in the series, you can say that again.

Here’s the video clip (it’s August, so take the time to watch it):

[Photo above: Tourists at an erupting Old Faithful. Yellowstone National Park, 1884. Source: Haynes Foundation Collection, Montana Historical Society]

Bob Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company (DIS), was the kickoff interview onstage at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm Tech conference, which is taking place over the next three days in Pasadena, Calif.

The event is packed full of Web and media luminaries.

So, BoomTown will be sitting in the front row and liveblogging some of the sessions here, including this one, titled, “Digital Kingdom: New Business Models for a Media Giant.”

Translation: When you Twitter upon a star, makes a–big–difference what you earn.

Which, right now, is not a whole lot, as Iger and others in the media business know all too well.

But let’s set the scene: Iger looks like a very typical old-media mogul you might order from an online catalog–handsome, suave and sophisticated, a perfect mix of Hollywood and New York.

Thank goodness, then, that he never seems to have acquired that other irksome characteristic of some of his peers–a full-bored panic over the Internet.

In fact, Iger–whom I also interviewed onstage at the fourth D: All Things Digital conference in 2006–has been unusually fast-forward among many of the big media companies in facing the digital music and dancing.

Fortune writer Richard Siklos asked him about a mishmash of subjects, from subscription services to authentication to cable providers, all of which center around a basic question:

How the heck is Disney going to be paid for its wares–because someday those agelessly lucrative “kids” from “High School Musical” are not going to agree to yet another reunion?

“This is the beginning of the beginning,” said Iger, who noted that it would be folly to guess what’s coming next in the digital arena.

A most excellent point that he made several times, adding that it was important for companies like Disney to keep trying out all sorts of things digitally, until they got it right.

“This notion of protecting the present is something that I talk a lot about [with employees],” said Iger, who wants them not to do that so much.

He noted that running a modern media company meant you had to have “one hand in the present and one hand in the future.”

Iger forgot about the hand that you might need to protect yourself from partners of the present–like big-box retailers, television affiliates, cable networks–who are going to come at you with a cudgel for giving the stuff you sell them away free on, say, Hulu.

Hulu, of course, is the popular, tiny-money-making premium online video service, which is a joint partnership of News Corp. (NWS), GE’s (GE) NBC Universal and now Disney.

“We believe in Hulu,” said Iger, who thinks its business model–currently just online advertising–might evolve over time.

But, he added, he was “somewhat skeptical” of any one answer to what is ahead.

As in: Iger just does not know, which is probably the best thing a media mogul can say right now.

Except for one thing he said is always mindful of–to follow, “where the consumer is going.”

Consumers are going online, of course, which is certainly going to require all-hands-on-deck at Disney in the years ahead.

[Update: It seems Disney was keeping its hand in the present for today, as it apparently had YouTube take down a trailer for its new "Alice in Wonderland" movie, which was set to debut at Comic-Con International in San Diego tomorrow.]