Last night, BoomTown moderated a really interesting panel for an organization called Girls in Tech, titled “Journalism 2.0 RoundTable.”

Girls in Tech describes itself as a “social network enterprise focused on the engagement, education and empowerment of like-minded, professional, intelligent & influential women.”

With those lofty requirements–combined with the fact that I was a girl when we had yet to land on the moon–I have no idea what I was doing there.

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What’s in a name?

Well, a lot, actually, and BoomTown supposes it would be just like those Pacific Northwest types at Microsoft to name the new version of its search service “Bing,” presumably after the cherry that is a big product in the company’s home state.

That moniker is one of many being bandied about in a group the software giant could be considering for the big relaunch of its search service, which it has been prepping.

But Microsoft should forget the fruity metaphor, also rename its MSN online service “Bada” and use this motto: “Bada Bing, Bada Boom, Notta Bada Algorithm!”

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BoomTown read a ton of the various columns reacting to the Associated Press’s announcement of a new initiative to–as near as I can tell–stop the Internet from being the Internet.

I tease, as it is a lot more complicated than that. But AP board Chairman and MediaNews group CEO Dean Singleton seemed very exercised about his mission to “protect news content from misappropriation.”

It’s going to surely be an interesting debate, kicked off by a very curious quote Singleton gave to paidContent.org: “Print is still the meat. Online’s the salt and pepper.”

A tasty debate!

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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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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Here’s Part 3 of 4 of an interview Walt Mossberg did with the Gates Foundation’s Melinda Gates.

In this video, Melinda Gates talks about the best ways to fix the broken parts of the public high school educational system in the U.S.

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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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In a new BoomTown occasional feature that I am calling “Meet the Geeky Press,” here’s a video interview I did with Dan Farber, who was just appointed new editor-in-chief of CNet’s News.com, while I was at the Graphing Social Patterns West conference in San Diego earlier this week.
Farber, a longtime tech reporter and columnist, as [...]

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Lots of people were bellyaching about the lackluster nature of Bill Gates’s final performance at CES last night–long on deals and stats and short on the futuristic predictions Gates often makes.

Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski was unimpressed, as were Duncan Riley of TechCrunch and ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, for example.
But, to my mind, giving the Microsoft [...]

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