The Mobuzz.tv survival saga continues and the verdict is: It’s down but not out…yet. Last week, the producer of free online video shows, based in Spain, has been essentially panhandling its users, asking in a series of videos for five Euros each to keep it afloat until it can get more funding. Mobuzz wanted to raise 120,000 Euros by this week. And while it only has gotten about one-fourth–or 33,000 Euros–of the way there, despair not! Mobuzz’s Anil de Mello says it will flippity-flop on, even as it is creating some of the more compelling content on the Web of…

I blame post-election exhaustion for rendering me comatose after Tuesday, which is how this video I did at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last week got stuck in my to-do-later pile. (I did manage to get the MySpace Music party video up though, but that was because it was more fun!) Well, it has been since fished out, including interviews with conference organizers, John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, as well as Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt (who is apparently scared of me, which is just the way I like it) and Microsoft’s man-in-Silicon-Valley Dan’l Lewin. The…

Let’s get this out of the way: BoomTown completely missed Lionel Richie perform, cooling our heels outside behind the rope line at the MySpace party in San Francisco last night. Major bummer. That aside, I did finally get in and did a video at the rocking event, which the SoCal-based social-networking site–owned by News Corp. (NWS), which owns this site too–threw at the lovely Old Mint building, after the day’s proceedings at the Web 2.0 Summit. It featured that exclusive performance by Richie, and also song-spinning by DJ AM. But mostly, it was the scene of a lot of…

Is it just me or does it feel like the whole odd public back- and-forth between Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is beginning to mimic the endless loop of the deeply annoying relationship between Ross Geller and Rachel Green on the long-running NBC television hit, “Friends”? At least in their star-crossed hijinks, Ross and Rachel smooched from time to time in between the juvenile bickering (”We were on a break!”) and push-me-pull-you antics. And, mercifully for fans of the show, they got together in the very last episode. But with Yang and Ballmer,…

Well, this was certainly predictable–the mindless piling on of Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang now taking place in the blogosphere, in the wake of yet another setback for the troubled Internet company. This time, it comes after the collapse of the search advertising deal with Google yesterday. BoomTown is not saying the co-founder of Yahoo does not deserve criticism for how he has run the company since last summer–in fact, this column has been quite active in following the story. There are very real questions about whether Yang has the right talent and temperament for the job at hand, as…

I was in Detroit last week... I have family there. I also drive a car. And I would rather that the world doesn't melt and the economy thrive. So I'm uniquely qualified to weigh in on the automobile industry. Not only should Congress encourage/facilitate the organized bankruptcy of the Big Three, but it should also make it easy for them to be replaced by 500 new car companies. Or perhaps a thousand. That's how many car companies there were 90 years ago. That's right, when all the innovation hit the car industry, there were thousands of car companies, with hundreds running at any one time. From…

If you're a signed in user of Google, you'll notice the most significant change in search since their launch. You can now interact with search results, wiki style. You can vote them up or down and leave comments. And they will be seen by others. 1. This is going to lead to an incredible rush by small businesses and social networkers. They're going to go crazy trying to game the system. 2. Google is going to find that millions of people pay a lot more attention to their search results (for now). Interesting to consider what happens after that. How do they handle the deluge? Does democracy…

Make money: not by building an internet company, but by using the net as a tool to create value and get paid. Use the internet as a tool, not as an end. Do it when you are part of a big organization or do it as a soloist. The dramatic leverage of the net more than overcomes the downs of the current economy. The essence is this: connect. Connect the disconnected to each other and you create value. Connect advertisers to people who want to be advertised to. Connect job hunters with jobs. Connect information seekers with information. Connect teams to each other. Connect those seeking similar.

Why do banks spend so much money on marble lobbies, high ceilings and yes, $400 million to name a baseball stadium? Why do marketers buy TV ads that don't increase sales in the short run? Why have a receptionist and not just a house phone where you can call the person you came to see? For the same reason that so many people have a green front lawn. It's organized waste. Profligate spending designed to communicate confidence and just a bit of hubris. Do you really want to invest money at a bank run by a guy with nothing but a bridge table and a cheap suit? Probably not. At some level, we like…

[This post is cynical. You've been warned.] If you think that's a friend of yours on twitter, don't be so sure. If you wonder why your boss sent such an insane email to you, don't be so sure. If you get a chance to invest online, think twice. Don't buy anything from an inbound phone call. That email you sent in confidence... probably won't be read that way. And that photo, yes, it's going to show up in the digital world where you least want to see it... In your little village, where you see your neighbor every day for ten years and the person in the next car might be the local constable, the…