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 the company has been prepping.

Microsoft’s search service is currently called–zzzzz–Live Search.

“All About Microsoft” crack blogger Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet recently wrote about the Bing name, which is registered to the company, as well as “Hook” and the one that Microsoft is using now as its test name, Kumo.

Kumo means “cloud” and “spider” in Japanese, which seems a wee bit esoteric.

Today, paidContent.org dropped “Sift” into the mix, although it seems to be related to mobile phones, along with “Swivel.”

I, for one, am feeling both like flour and getting dizzy at the thought of those names.

Foley at ZDnet feels the same, noting today in a post:

“(Would Microsoft be crazy enough to trademark its general Web search engine and its search engine for mobile with two different names, say Bing and Sift? As Windows Live has shown, truth can be stranger than fiction….)”

Microsoft (MSFT), of course, is keeping the name for its search service under tight wraps, but it is obviously going to be spending a shipload of money on its branding in another attempt to catch market leaders Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO).

Microsoft has been recently talking to Yahoo about a search partnership deal, although they are likely both to keep their brands and search products in any event.

Nonetheless, execs and minions in the know laugh at me loudly when I ask them to leak it to me.

(Note to anyone at Microsoft: Pretty please, someone leak it to me, even if it’s in the form of a memo from the leaky cauldron that is Yahoo.)

I doubt someone will, though. “It’s like Fort Knox secret,” said one Softie source, referring to the Kentucky fortress where the largest amount of the United States gold reserves are stored.

Hey, if Auric Goldfinger, OddJob and Pussy Galore could get into Fort Knox in that most excellent James Bond film, I can certainly find out the name of Microsoft’s search service!

Personally, I like Bing, and cherries from Washington state are indeed tasty (and coming soon too!)

According to the Heart of Washington Web site, its state’s cherries rate. Some fun factoids:

- Washington State produces more than 50 percent of all the sweet cherries in the United States.
- The Rainier cherry, which is yellow with a red blush, was made from a cross between two dark red cherries, the Van and Bing.
- Americans eat approximately 2.6 pounds of cherries per year.
- There are approximately 53 pitted cherries in one pound of cherries.
- The Bing cherry, which all cherries are measured against, was first developed in 1874 in Milwaukie, Ore.
- The Bing cherry was named after one of Seth Lewelling’s workers. The Bing cherry was developed by Seth Lewelling.
- Washington cherries are shipped around the world; the top three foreign markets are Canada, Taiwan and Japan.
- In 2001, there were 29,000 acres of sweet cherries in the state.
- The Washington cherry season begins in late May with some product seen at farmer’s markets. Commercial shipping begins around June 5, and will continue until mid-August. The peak of the season runs from June 20 to Aug. 1.

Plus, if Microsoft uses Bing, they could also rebrand their MSN online service, “Bada” and their email product, “Boom.”

Then, they can get Tony Soprano as their spokesman with the motto: “Bada Bing, Bada Boom, Notta Bada Algorithm!”

Or better still: “If you use Google, we’ll whack you!”

Now, that’s more like it.

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 clearly 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, throwing even more light on both the way the Web has impacted media companies, but also just how valuable those companies are (or are not–for an interesting take on that, see this excellent piece by ZDNet blogger Larry Dignan).

The winner for the most curious quote yesterday, though, was from an interview Singleton gave to paidContent.org’s Staci Kramer about new models to come.

Said Singleton: “Print is still the meat. Online’s the salt and pepper.”

I would actually say online is increasingly the sizzle.

But what Singleton left out, especially given the financial trouble his company is currently in, was far more important–it’s the consumer doing the grilling.

Thus, it goes without saying that the meat could be in danger of being a tad well done if media companies are not careful in how they handle this new attack on how those consumers prefer to get their news.

In the meantime, here is a very pertinent–the Internet is good at that stuff–and very funny video of an “eat your steak” commercial:

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. Pittman will also join its board.

Playlist has previously raised several million dollars, said sources, but the new funding is many times that, to total about $18 to $20 million.

The move to Playlist is an interesting one for Van Natta, who has looked at a number of jobs since leaving the high-profile social-networking site earlier this year.

He has talked to a wide range of companies, sources said, including Microsoft (MSFT) and a range of start-ups, as well as with MySpace, which is owned by News Corp. (NWS). (News Corp. also owns this site).

Those talks between Van Natta and MySpace to run its new music initiative did not pan out for a variety of reasons.

But he has long expressed a desire to become a CEO of a company, rather than just head to another executive job within a larger company, so the move to run a start-up is not a surprise.

In an interview this afternoon, Van Natta told me he got very intrigued by the possibilities at Project Playlist, which was the first iteration of the start-up and in which he is an investor, due to its viral growth.

And, indeed, Playlist has grown quickly to become one of the larger music communities on the Web, claiming that more than 38 million music fans monthly, sharing playlists via its Web site and also widely distributed embeddable widgets. The site has tens of millions of daily page views, according to surveys.

To get to those big-scale numbers, Playlist essentially has offered users a giant linking service for music, not unlike Google (GOOG) with all information, pointing users to promotional, free and sometimes illegal music and music video tracks all over the Web.

Those links to illegal music have resulted in a lawsuit aimed at Playlist from the music industry, sources said, a sadly typical experience of many online music services.

The usual tactic for the music giants: Sue first and shake down later.

Under Van Natta, I would guess, Playlist is likely to reach out to music companies and strike deals.

The company also needs to settle on its main business plan, which appears to me to have been less important than its explosive growth.

Playlist currently does have some small amount of advertising on the site, and seems to be making most of its scratch from sending leads to ringtone sellers.

Van Natta did not want to reveal specific strategies for Playlist going forward, only noting the opportunity is large.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta. “And the company that does the best job of taking advantage of that is really going to be huge.”

That said, there have been a lot of music-aimed efforts like Playlist in the music space, with a lot of different business plans and varying degrees of success, ranging from the Apple (AAPL) behemoth iTunes site, which sells single songs, to the CBS (CBS) music service, Last.fm, which relies more on advertising revenues.

Other contenders in the space include the Rhapsody subscription service from RealNetworks (RNWK), music discovery service iLike and many others. MySpace has also waded deeply into the music space, and Facebook is also reportedly weighing its own service.

Van Natta was one of Facebook’s earliest and most prominent execs, serving in jobs like COO and also Chief Revenue Officer while there.

He came to Facebook in the fall of 2005, after a stint as VP of Worldwide Business and Corporate Development at Amazon, and was part of the founding team of A9, the Amazon search company.

“I am excited to be building a company again,” said Van Natta, who has taken many months off since he left Facebook in February.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety over the next weeks in this column.

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

(I will be posting one video part of the discussion with Melinda Gates every day this week through Thursday.)

As you will see, Melinda Gates is articulate in ways that are critical to the task that she and her husband–that would be Microsoft (MSFT) Founder Bill Gates–have put before themselves: Big league philanthropy with deeply effective results, specifically in health and learning.

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.

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 open-source blogging software project at WordPress.org with Mullenweg as founding developer, while WordPress.com is for-profit and is run by Mullenweg and others at a start-up called Automattic.

Mullenweg came to San Francisco from his hometown of Houston to work on WordPress and other projects for CNET in 2004. He left a year later to work full-time on the development of WordPress.

It and others like it quickly rode the wave of an ever-growing trend of self-publishing, which has been increasingly embraced by both the single person writing about their cat to the large-scale media companies looking to develop more dynamic properties online.

WordPress and Automattic (which also runs Akismet, an anti-comment and trackback spam software service) has been the frequent target of takeover speculation.

But, while Automattic has reportedly considered those options, as well as hooking up with other companies like Sphere (which was just bought for $35 million in cash by AOL [TWX]), Mullenweg seems just as determined to build out his simple publishing platform, by adding ad networks and all sorts of bells and whistles to the offerings.

In fact, WordPress competitor Six Apart did just that last week with its acquisition of the New York-based ad, design and consulting services firm Apperceptive.

So I will bet Mullenweg probably has some news of his own, when he gives a short speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this morning.

We’ll see, but in this video, Mullenweg talks with BoomTown–after we admit to an obvious man crush on him–about the progress in the blog-publishing arena and where it is all going.

Here’s the video:

Farber, a longtime tech reporter and columnist, as well as a blogger, replaces Jai Singh. Farber was previously editor-in-chief of CNet’s ZDNet.

The tech news-and-reviews online media company has been under a lot of pressure lately, with challenges from some aggressive investors who are trying to take control of CNet, as well as increased competition from all over the Web that is impacting its traffic.

In any case, in Farber, who also ran ZDnet’s blogging network, CNet has a solid journalist in charge.

In the video, Farber and I talk about a wide range of issues, from Web consolidation to the trends in social networking to future tech trends, including his thoughts on Google and Apple:

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 co-founder and chairman a hard time at this point is sort of like razzing Celine Dion, who coincidentally also just completed her own longtime run in Las Vegas in her Caesars Palace show, “A New Day.”

In other words, let’s just all admit that–as irksome as both have sometimes been–they do kind of grow on you after a while.

While that may be still debatable with Dion, I know, it is squarely the case with Gates, who has had the longest-running and most complicated relationship with the tech industry, even as he has dominated it for most of the past two-plus decades.

Gates’s impact will surely be chewed over in the history books in centuries hence–likely as not, always with the Yin to his Yang, Steve Jobs of Apple.

And, despite all the controversy his tenure has engendered (most especially the bullying antitrust behavior), as he transitions from his day-to-day role at Microsoft in July in what will likely be one of the longer goodbyes in the digital arena (including his sixth appearance at our D6 conference in May), I am guessing his influence will be seen as a net plus in the years to come.

While many level charges at Microsoft as a hindrance to innovation over the years, via the overwhelming dominance of its Windows operating system, the fact of the matter is that the digital industry has never been more fast-moving and quick-changing, and it remains one of the brighter spots in the pantheon of businesses worldwide.

While that is not because of Gates and Microsoft alone, it is also not in spite of them either. In fact, it’s quite bracing to see Gates attempt to make quick shifts over the years as technology has raced past him, an indication of just how powerful change is compared to the world’s richest man.

Very powerful, as it has turned out, and watching Gates try to keep up has been a perfect metaphor for all those who labor in the tech sector.

His famous December, 1995 sleeping-giant-has-awakened speech about the Internet was a case in point, as were his aggressive moves in later years into a wide range of arenas such as gaming, search, online services, social networking and even an attempt to take on the iPod hegemony with the Zune.

It is clear that most of Microsoft’s efforts outside of its core software business–and a great business it remains, by the way–have been less impressive. But it points to a key factor that never changes throughout the tech arena that even the giants are always vulnerable.

Now, going forward, what Microsoft will do post-Gates, of course, is all that matters.

Will it try to vaunt ahead in the search and portal arena and catch No. 1 Google by attempting to acquire Yahoo?

Will it use its popular Xbox to finally move successfully into the home-entertainment space, as evidenced by announcements Gates made last night at CES about deals with media giants like NBC Universal and others?

Can its MSN ever be more than just an also-ran portal?

What will happen to software in the years ahead as applications inevitably move to the Web?

Gates will not be the one to figure it all out, as he will be off, focused on his laudable philanthropic work when these questions and more get answered.

But even he could not have made an accurate guess onstage last night, as much as pundits wanted him to.

In fact, one of the more tiresome things to endure at CES–aside from the long lines–is always having to listen to the spate of predictions of what is to come, when, the truth is, no one really knows how it will all turn out.

It was always thus. After all, reaching way back in history: Wasn’t the launch of the Titantic supposed to herald in the age of high-tech super-boats? Of course, no one figured in the tragic results from its encounter with an iceberg.

But it did make for a pretty good song, so let’s enjoy a bit of Celine to send Bill Gates off on what one hopes is a much safer journey: