For Apple, these are small distribution deals. Alaska Communications has a little more than 100,000 subscribers in its namesake territory; nTelos has about 400,000 in Virginia and surrounding states. That’s far, far fewer than AT&T or Verizon, which both claim more than 100 million. Still, signing up smaller carriers is important to Apple’s push for iPhone ubiquity, and these deals with nTelos and Alaska, small as they are, will help accelerate its market-share growth.

Update: Looks like this is a far broader regional rollout than originally thought. As MacRumors notes, GCI in Alaska, Appalachian Wireless in Kentucky and Cellcom in Wisconsin will also add the iPhone to their lineups on April 20.

The ever-bickering crop of current Republican Presidential nominees dragging themselves to the first Iowa vote in the coming weeks almost makes you wish for a true political character to liven up the proceedings.

Or some nostalgia for the last go-round, which is definitely present in this trailer for HBO’s upcoming adaptation of “Game Change,” the lively book about the 2008 campaign, featuring the always telegenic Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska governor is played this time around by Julianne Moore, who really looks and sounds like the GOP VP candidate.

You betcha, she does:

So says Web infrastructure giant Akamai (AKAM), via its just-released “State of the Internet” report:

And if speed’s your thing? Then just like last year, you’ll want to get yourself to Delaware, where people enjoy incorporating companies and plentiful broadband.

Yesterday, BoomTown posted Part One of an interview with Microsoft’s Greg Nelson and Yahoo’s Mark Morrissey.

The pair (pictured here) are in charge of a two-year effort to coordinate a massive search and online advertising partnership, the result of a deal the companies struck last year.

It is critical they get it right, as Microsoft (MSFT) and Yahoo (YHOO) have a lot riding on the success of the effort, which is an attempt to catch up with search giant and dominant market leader Google (GOOG).

The companies–one from Washington state and the other from Silicon Valley–have a combined share of close to 30 percent, and the hope is that together the partnership is a better offering to both advertisers and consumers.

We’ll see about that, of course, but here’s the rest of what they had to say about the attempt in all its gory details:

MARK MORRISSEY: Let’s talk a little bit about–hopefully this won’t be too boring–but let’s talk a little bit about the execution process, because then this will give you the insight.

So, remember, Greg said we had about 25 people in each of our respective transition teams, that basically there’s a lead, and they’re all mirrored for each of the major elements of the program. Each of them, they all have their own execution structures, right, because they have whole teams of people that are working on their stuff.

So, we basically…Greg and I lead the overall transition. There are three primary areas: The algo transition, the paid search transition, and all sales and marketing. That third part is maybe the biggest of the three.

Then the 25 underneath that group, and then there’s hundreds and in some cases thousands of people underneath them in support of that.

So, they have each of their own weekly cadence of when they get together and how they make their decisions. That rolls all up to Greg and I, and Greg and I are responsible for what we call the plan of record that sets the milestones and locks the scope and the sequence of markets.

We completed our plan of record, except for the sequence of markets, because we’ve not finalized that, but all the rest of it, the scope, the timing, major milestones. We signed that off in what we call our joint operating team that meets weekly up here. And that’s just about 16 people on the joint operating team.

GREG NELSON: Yeah, more or less, all your core leads.

MARK MORRISSEY: We meet weekly. We make basically the scope change control decisions, any changes in milestones.

So, that’s how we control the overall program, keep it on schedule; we look at confidence levels, sign off on road maps, final signoff, that kind of stuff gets handled there.

Then once a month each of us…so, I meet with [Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz]. So, I work for Carol. I meet with Carol’s staff, give her staff a full briefing. Greg meets with the executive steering committee.

And then about every six or eight weeks, Carol wants to get together.

So, we have real, unbelievable top-down support and engagement, and we have a formal decision-making process that goes all the way down from the individual sub-element of the program up to a common place that we guide and make decisions on.

BOOMTOWN: And going forward–what I’m thinking about is things that happen later that you might want. All of a sudden Google is doing search by mental telepathy, for example.

MARK MORRISSEY: I heard about that one, yeah.

BOOMTOWN: Whatever they’re doing.

MARK MORRISSEY: It’s going to take them a long time to get that done.

BOOMTOWN: Well, they’re aliens. I told you, they’re aliens. No one believes me.

So, they decide to do something that you need, or else you like come up with some grand new idea that Google hasn’t thought of. How does that go into place?

GREG NELSON: Well, I mean, it could be…it would probably start informally, right? So, Mark and I either talk or email basically every day.

MARK MORRISSEY: Usually many times.

BOOMTOWN: I’m talking about year four.

GREG NELSON: Yeah, I know, but I’m just saying the strength of the relationship is in large part…you know, this is the pivot point. You’re sitting with the two guys to try and pivot this thing both up and down.

More likely than not, like just before you were coming up here, we were trading notes on a couple different processes that we’re trying to build or checking in on one thing or another.

So, if [Microsoft Online Services President Qi Lu] gets a big brainwave about the next big thing we’re going to do in search, and we’re going to build it into the API, probably what happens, because I get asked to do this 50 times a week, is, “Hey, why don’t you chat with Mark about that and see if Yahoo has got any interest.”

So, you’ve got this really high-frequency, pretty high-fidelity conversation, and then we might say, okay, yeah, that’s interesting, like let’s go activate it in the sales track and in the ops track and let’s pull in some of our leads, let’s brainstorm it, and then you’d push it in both directions.

MARK MORRISSEY: Right, because it has to fit into both companies’ road maps, right, and then what sales and marketing does, and if it’s customer facing it affects what sales is going to do.

GREG NELSON: And then you’d say, okay, we have this plan of record, that’s a big enough one, wow, that’s an amazing idea, let’s change the plan of record, and then we have a formal process to do that kind of change.

MARK MORRISSEY: And four years from now the plan of record won’t be around transition, it will be around what’s the next set of releases, what are our market objectives, how are we going to go.

BOOMTOWN: Let’s talk about that, what the next, when you’re not as you’re thinking this all the time on a daily basis, what is from your perspective the next thing in search or things that are further along.

GREG NELSON: Next big idea?

BOOMTOWN: Yeah.

GREG NELSON: Is that what you mean?

BOOMTOWN: Yeah.

GREG NELSON: Yeah, we can come back to that one. I’ll try and think up something really smart by the time we get back to it.

BOOMTOWN: Okay. So, sales and marketing.

MARK MORRISSEY: Yeah, so like I said, one of, if not the most important area for long-term success, is around sales and marketing. There’s a rather interesting and complicated setup here where we have a larger sales team with a little bit more experience, and then each of the regions, right, will have their sales teams. The sales team will still report to [Yahoo U.S. head Hilary Schneider] to run the overall thing, but the sales teams report regionally. And yet they have to learn adCenter.

So, there’s just a tremendous amount of training, right, to bring the Yahoo team up on adCenter, because I think the most important thing is not the transition, it’s optimizing on behalf of every advertiser after the transition, to achieve their market objectives.

There’s just a humongous amount of training broken up into four courses, huge investment that the Yahoo team is making in the training materials and the man-hours and all that preparation work that they have with their customers. All the customer communications that are happening now, we’re starting to do joint communication events, we had a big search alliance forum in Seattle two weeks ago.

GREG NELSON: Yeah, the search and marketing forum was here, and so we brought customers in a day before to just spend a day with Microsoft and Yahoo to learn about the search alliance.

We got up on stage first and sort of told the vision and took just open Q&A and said, what do you want to talk about, and then we had breakout groups with customers just to say what are you really interested in, what does a successful transition look like to you, what services or kind of information do you need.

This is an area where you could easily be in tension, right, or where you could have conflict between your two sales forces. That’s been so much easier than I would have guessed, because of the maturity and professionalism.

We still handle what we call standard advertisers. So, if you are not a hand-sold kind of premium customer, but you come directly to the platform, then you come to Microsoft, because you’re really just coming to adCenter. Otherwise, you’re with Yahoo and Yahoo is your sales force.

BOOMTOWN: And I assume if you ever got to a display agreement struck, that would be a similar.

MARK MORRISSEY: I can’t comment on display, but there’s definitely a synergy between search and display, as you well know, yeah.

[But] I think I should talk about two things that we haven’t covered. One is about the benefits of the combined marketplace, and then also we haven’t mentioned anything about where we are in terms of the current progress, because it’s actually from my perspective pretty phenomenal in terms of how much we’ve gotten done.

Starting with the unified marketplace, one of the biggest benefits here in a scale business is having a sufficient level of volume in a single buy, with a single campaign, a single set of optimizations, to help advertisers to achieve their marketing objectives.

So, by combining each of our respective share numbers, it now produces really for any sizable advertiser close to 30 percent, plus or minus, right, depending on a couple things in the U.S., and that’s a must buy.

GREG NELSON: Lots of upside.

MARK MORRISSEY: We’ve got work to do.

GREG NELSON: Unlimited potential.

MARK MORRISSEY: Our Yahoo consumers who want to stay on Yahoo search, and we believe that because of the relevance of Microsoft’s results and the rest of the stuff we’re going to put around it, and how we wrap search into the overall experience, we shouldn’t give consumers any reason to go anywhere else to search. That should just lift share in and of itself.

GREG NELSON: The other nice thing, both if you want to look at it that way, is the more lopsided the share, the more enthusiastic advertisers and publishers are about the search alliance.

We have lots of friends all around the world rooting for us and asking how they can help.

MARK MORRISSEY: So, the benefit of a unified marketplace is that advertisers, you know, today they spend most of their time on Google, a little less time on Yahoo, less time on adCenter, and now we’re going to give them one system, one buy, with more clicks, which gives you more consistent performance. Their time is better spent on that optimization.

And not only does that generate just natural lift across the marketplace, but the main byproduct is it produces better ads. Better ads help produce a better search experience, better search experience and all positive…to feed the positive virtuous cycle.

We’ve gotten outstanding feedback, not that every single advertiser is happy, because there are some advertisers that would like to see maybe a non-liquid marketplace, because that was good for them. But, by and large, you look across the base, our customers are very happy.

The biggest thing is they want us to do it with quality, and they want us just to be transparent with where we are along the process.

So, can we switch to talk about where we are?

BOOMTOWN: Okay.

MARK MORRISSEY: So, we signed in December. We have regulatory clearance, commencement in February, and we got to plan of record in May. We’ve been coding like mad, sales, market teams working through their plans. And we are now in the testing phase, which is really significant.

We still have coding to do, there’s a couple more really significant releases that we have to do together before the paid transition can occur. But right now we’re in the testing phase.

We are well into the testing phase for algo, and we’re starting the testing phase for paid. I think what I said at analyst day, because I did show that one example from that, and that was we are continuing to progress right along our testing plan. A huge achievement on Friday, we got to 100 percent of a certain level of testing, and so far so good.

But the hardest work is still in front of us, but if you just think of it, we’re chipping away week by week by week.

That requires all this complexity to work, right, because a query has to come to Yahoo, we’ve got to send it off through Microsoft’s API and we’ve got to get the results, and then we’ve got to put all of our other stuff around it and deliver the whole page experience.

BOOMTOWN: In speed.

MARK MORRISSEY: In speed, that’s right, that’s right.

BOOMTOWN: And you’re also testing the advertiser experience.

MARK MORRISSEY: Right. They’re separate, okay. We are going to run bucket tests of them together and separate, as you’d expect, but the actual traffic switch can be done separate, algo versus paid.

Right now we’re in the testing phase, and it’s going as well…it’s going better than I had hoped it would go. I mean, it’s not to say that we are in the clear on this, but, in terms of ramping up that process, checking off our weekly milestone, the testing process is going really well so far.

BOOMTOWN: And the people at Yahoo in that area are pleased with it? Because they’re again the customers in a weird way.

MARK MORRISSEY: We have a lot of work to do, too. I don’t want to make it sound like we’re all just customers here, but yeah, I mean, like we were skeptical about how quickly some of this work could get done, how quickly the relevance numbers could get achieved. We were confident Microsoft was the right choice. And it’s so far, so good. The things are working as we had hoped. Relevance is really good. I said that at analyst day the relevance is really good, and we’re cautiously optimistic.

BOOMTOWN: And the other thing that’s interesting to me now is the thing that Google can’t search, and neither can you is a lot of the people data in Facebook and all the social networking sites that get very deep and complex.

GREG NELSON: Part of your question about the future of search may be more a cooperation, really driven by consumer demand for those parts of the Web to become more open, which would be great.

There are some companies that don’t necessarily want to participate, but if consumers either vote with their feet or apply enough pressure, that that stuff should open up.

At some point maybe it just becomes overwhelming. You know [Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving], who’s now at Yahoo. One of the things he worked on really hard here when he was at Microsoft was interoperability between our two messaging platforms.

There is an example where really the consumer value is very obvious, very powerful, and eventually it broke through. You may find the same in the sort of non-crawlable parts of the Web, because when people think of search-oriented, keyword-based navigation of information as something that they expect, if you can’t get to some type of data through that, they may just stop using it, because it’s too inconvenient.

MARK MORRISSEY: I think that’s kind of the point I was trying to make earlier is that the search experience has to evolve significantly.

And I’ll call it the traditional search if the consumer knows exactly what they’re looking for, and they’re going to go through page after page of results. That’s yesterday’s search game. Search is more navigational now, it’s definitely more social, and helping users to find information that they’re looking for in a more natural way, rather than just a query and going through pages of blue links. We think that’s really critical.

By leveraging Microsoft’s huge investments in I’ll call it the traditional aspect of search, that always has to happen, right, the indexing, the crawling and the ranking is huge, hugely important, and useful, absolutely, and then layering on top of that two companies really focused on evolving the future of the search experience, and each of us having our own skills.

GREG NELSON: Just getting back to sort of what people want or what they expect, I assume you saw some of the research that we did when we were designing Bing. It’s something like over 60 percent, something like 65 percent of search sessions are unsuccessful.

So, the future of search is not just improving relevance, but also bringing people the answer so that your percentage of sessions that are successful goes very close to 100 percent, and the amount of time that you spend in that navigational part of the session has to get smaller and smaller and smaller.

The decision engine sort of positioning, the thing that led us in that direction was that very long term bet that you can understand the intent of the user, and then translate that into a different form of relevance, and you can serve up increasingly rich, not links, because links are just a way to end up somewhere else that you may not know anything about, but serve up high quality, credible answers or results or experiences, without having to navigate out of the search paradigm.

MARK MORRISSEY: To me when we talk about experiences, it’s that. It’s not just a query and results, it’s leading the user through the information that they’re looking for.

A big driver for the decision that we made in the partnership with Microsoft is to allow us to focus on that.

GREG NELSON: There are a whole lot of premium opportunities that are available to Yahoo.

We have a lot of things that are in the core API, we have a lot of things that can be put in the API.

And so Yahoo can form their strategy about what they want to do with the user experience, and we have a lot of things to do too.

The thing that’s been fun for me, and you know this by covering MSN, too, is you step into the search discussion at Microsoft at any level of the company, and you feel the level of focus and energy and forward momentum. Because when this company gets really serious about something, you really feel it. I mean, you felt it in Windows and Office and Internet Explorer. And now you feel it in search. Both the product experience like Bing but also at the platform level.

It’s fun. Like as someone that has spent 15 years now, I just had my 15th anniversary a couple weeks ago…

BOOMTOWN: What do you get?

GREG NELSON: You get a big piece of glass.

BOOMTOWN: Really?

GREG NELSON: Yeah.

BOOMTOWN: Like a vase?

GREG NELSON: No, like a big monolith.

BOOMTOWN: Really?

GREG NELSON: Yes.

BOOMTOWN: Nice.

GREG NELSON: Come over to my office and I’ll show you.

BOOMTOWN: Okay. [Laughter.]

GREG NELSON: But, I mean, the focus that you feel there, for somebody that has worked on a part of the business that’s less strategic, has been really fun, really energizing, and just great to work on.

MARK MORRISSEY: And that’s been proven out as we’ve worked through step by step through the things that we’ve needed to do. There hasn’t been a time where they’ve said, no, we’re not going to invest to go get that stuff. There has been clear focus at every level of the organization. And again the quality of what they’ve produced so far–not that they’re done, there’s a lot of work still left to go–but the quality has been fantastic. And I have looked forward to the future stuff that we’ve started to talk about here.

BOOMTOWN: Who do you actually report to?

MARK MORRISSEY: Carol.

BOOMTOWN: Carol, directly.

MARK MORRISSEY: Yes.

We sat down when she asked me to take the job, and she decided she wanted to have direct engagement.

And then clearly because this role spans across each of the different functions, our entire search business is what we’re changing in order to facilitate that.

BOOMTOWN: So, you’re up here [in the Seattle area]. You’re up here, what, every week?

MARK MORRISSEY: I live in southern California, because I started with Panama.

BOOMTOWN: So, you come up every week?

MARK MORRISSEY: Yeah, yeah, at least once a week. And generally it’s Thursdays is when we have our joint operating team meeting.

GREG NELSON: Yeah, if you want to buy airline stocks, like Alaska (ALK) and Southwest (LUV), I mean, between our leads going down and Yahoo’s leads coming up, wow, it’s amazing.

MARK MORRISSEY: When we have a center of operation for decisions tend to be here a little bit more, but that when you get down a level and we’re into each individual team’s discussion, like the algo team, their big meetings are on Thursdays, and they switch back and forth between here and the Sunnyvale area.

GREG NELSON: A lot of what we’re working on right now is engineering migration; we try and put Mark in the rooms with engineering leaders and whatever.

BOOMTOWN: Right, okay. And then you’ll continue to do that right through the…

MARK MORRISSEY: As long as it’s needed.

Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is certainly giving her Facebook fan page a workout this week, as she nears one million fans.

Using the site to flack her new book, “Going Rogue,” which comes out officially today, it got a big boost from her interview today with Oprah Winfrey, clocking in at close to 995,000 fans last night.

Posts include info on her multipart interview with Barbara Walters, her unhappiness with the recent cover of her in running clothes in Newsweek magazine (“The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now.”) and, of course, how the media were unfairly attacking her.

Interestingly, Palin’s followers for the book in Twitter (#SarahPalinUSA) number a paltry 17,624.

Still, Palin has other Twitter accounts, such as when she was governor of Alaska (153,432), but this is still a very small audience.

(By the way, President Barack Obama is closing in on seven million fans on Facebook and 2.7 million followers on Twitter.)

As the media onslaught gains steam, here is some video of Palin’s television interview on “Oprah” yesterday:

The former Alaska governor stopped using her previous account, AKGovSarahPalin, on July 26, her last day in office. Her farewell tweet: “Last state twitter. Thank you Alaska! I love you. God bless Alaska. God bless the U.S.A.”

That account is still up, where she has more than 135,000 followers. She hasn’t posted any updates under her new name, though it already has some 2,500 followers.

It’s not clear how CNN verified that the new account is legitimate, and Ms. Palin has been a frequent target of online impersonators.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Florida Elections Commission has decided a mayoral candidate’s ads on Google and Facebook appear to violate the state’s election law because they don’t include a disclaimer that indicates who bought them. Many other states, including Texas, Alaska, Connecticut and Ohio, also require similar disclaimers.

The candidate’s campaign, however, argues that the messages in question aren’t technically ads, but rather links to ads, and that it doesn’t pay for them unless a Web user clicks on them.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In a genius pairing of subject and artist, here is the best online viral video this week from Conan O’Brien’s “Tonight Show,” featuring actor William Shatner reciting outgoing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s recent farewell speech verbatim.

You simply can’t make this stuff up.

Done in Shatner’s perfect Captain James T. Kirk/”Rocket Man”-style, here is the video from NBC (as well as Shatner interpreting the Elton John-Bernie Taupin hit song, and also my favorite impression of Palin by Tina Fey on “Saturday Night Live”):

The story went up on VF.com six days ago and has generated just under two million page views since then, says executive online editor Michael Hogan. (Disclosure: I’ve been a free-lance contributor to Vanity Fair’s “New Establishment” list in the past and will be again this year). Had Palin not made her blockbuster announcement on the Friday before the Fourth of July, the piece would be doing even better: Vanity Fair generated more traffic on the Tuesday the story was posted than the day after Palin made her news.

Still, it’s a big coup for the magazine’s site. The only way to generate more attention would be to run a slideshow featuring young attractive women.

Which the site can also do: Its story-and-photo package on Jessica Simpson, which ran in May, attracted 5.5 million page views to the site over a two-day period. Vanity Fair has generated 85 million page views so far this year, Hogan says.

And if you really want to generate traffic, run slideshows featuring very young attractive women. Last year the magazine’s 18-picture slideshow featuring a kind-of-topless Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus attracted some 18 million page views in a couple of days.

None of that will be terribly surprising to people who’ve wallowed in Web publishing for any amount of time. What surprised me a bit, though, was Vanity Fair’s decision to publish the piece in its entirety from the start. Doesn’t that cannibalize newsstand sales?

Maybe, says Hogan. But “it’s an open question as to what costs newsstand and what doesn’t.” And as the magazine tries to figure that out, he says, it has been experimenting. Some stuff goes up online before the magazine hits newsstands, while other pieces won’t appear on the site until a month later.

In the case of the Palin piece, the magazine had originally prepared to run an excerpt/summary of the story at first, then make the whole thing available by the end of the month after the news cycle was extinguished.

But on Friday, June 26, a few days before the excerpt was scheduled to run online, the magazine rethought its plan, assuming that the piece would be widely quoted and discussed before most people would ever see it. “The PR department started getting concerned that it was going to be controversial, and they wanted people to read the whole thing, and draw their own conclusions,” Hogan says. The final call went to Editor-in-Chief Graydon Carter, who, I gather, isn’t really much of a Web guy.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to read Michael Lewis’s latest piece for the magazine, on AIG’s (AIG) notorious “financial products” division. That one’s only available, for now, in excerpt form online, which means I’m actually going to have pay cash to read it, or wait a few hours–Hogan says it should be available in full later today.

I’ve also asked Mark Josephson, the CEO of Outside.in, a start-up that’s supposed organize and eventually profit from a proliferation of Web-generated local news, to explain how he’d save the likes of the P.I. He promises to get back to me soon.

Here’s one gambit that won’t work: A PR stunt organized on Facebook.

Some 6,000 people have signed on to support “National Buy a Newspaper Day,” which is supposed to be Feb. 2, and is exactly what it sounds like. The only way this one would work would be if it convinced deep-pocketed philanthropists to buy newspaper companies themselves–you can get a lot of them for very little these days.

But! There is a bit of hope for newspapers. For one thing, they still inspire the passion of people like Chris Freiberg, the 24-year-old reporter at the Daily News-Miner (Fairbanks, Alaska), who is organizing “Buy A Newspaper Day.”

I asked Chris to tell me a bit about himself and why he thought this might work, and his thoughtful and heartfelt response was enough to make me root for him. I’m pretty sure I’ll be reading his work in the future, regardless of the medium.

I recently graduated from Indiana University in 2007 with a degree in journalism. Though I’m still fairly young, I’ve actually done quite a bit in my career already. I started off writing a column for a small Catholic newspaper at the age of 14 and wrote for the Post-Tribune of Northwest Indiana throughout high school. I was the managing editor of the IU paper and have also had two articles published in Hustler magazine because of things that happened at IU (and yes, Hustler does actually print some articles).

My father, who passed away in 2000, started off a newspaperman when he left high school, though he eventually went into radio. My mom is currently a radio talk show host in the Chicago area. Really, it’s no surprise that I decided to pursue some form of journalism, though God knows, my mom tried to discourage me, constantly telling me there was no money in it. But it’s what I love doing and I’m happy.

As for why I started this event, I’ve read in particular the stories about what’s happening at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Chicago Tribune with great concern, that two such well-established newspapers may very well go out of business this year. Obviously though, those are just two of the biggest cases of a greater illness sweeping the industry.

Here in Fairbanks, because of our remoteness and the way the ownership of the paper is set up, we’re actually somewhat insulated from a lot of what happens in the rest of the country, but we’re still feeling some pain with multiple positions not being filled for several months to come. We had a staff meeting about these things last week, about our paper and the status of the industry, and I think one older reporter here put it best when she said that there are probably a lot of bad people out there who would love to see the newspaper industry go belly up.

I mean, there’s always going to be the national media keeping a close eye on what national politicians do, but if local newspapers start dying, who’s going to keep an eye on mayors and city councilmen? I’ve seen it myself that TV reporters ask two questions, get what they need for evening news, and then they’re gone. There’s no depth to their reporting.

That’s not to say that all or even most local politicians are corrupt, but I think it’s important that we have good newspaper reporters there keeping an eye on what goes on in local government, keeping the public well-informed about what’s happening in the community.

Millions of people have dogs to keep them safe, and being a dog owner myself, I know it doesn’t cost much more than 75 cents a day to keep that dog well-fed and happy. Newspapers can be just as effective a watch dog for the entire community, and they don’t require much more than that to survive either.”

Our friends at JibJab whipped up another odd video for us for the Thanksgiving holidays.

It includes some of our staff–the whole staff is here–glad we are not the poor turkey (for more on turkey mishaps, see this horrifying video of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin).

BoomTown is thankful for our great All Things D team, as well as our amazing readers. Also this year, for Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang, without whom there would be no news.

We’ll be publishing more lightly after tonight, but there will be news over the holiday weekend, so keep checking back.

Now, here’s our video:

How much do I love the Internet?

Muchety-much after seeing this interview that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gave plastered all over the Web, in which the former Republican VP candidate gives a local Anchorage television station an interview as a Thanksgiving turkey is being slaughtered right behind her.

Actually, I cannot exactly tell what the hapless workman is doing to the poor turkey in question, because he keeps coming in an out of the frame, carrying the feathered bird by the feet, not sure if he should be doing whatever he is doing as Palin speaks.

But the worker does leave and then return in the course of the interview and then turns on some funnel-shaped device that seems to shake up the bird in an awful way. Twice!

Still, ever the trouper (and sanguine hunter, it seems), Palin obliviously keeps up the turkey patter, having just “pardoned” another turkey earlier.

Such is fowl fate.

Here’s the video (and, after seeing it, tofu might look more palatable on Thursday or you can give to Farm Sanctuary’s Adopt-A-Turkey Project, which commented on the Palin interview):

As BoomTown expected, the popularity of the chaste-yet-lustful vampire movie for screaming teen girls everywhere, “Twilight,” has inspired more online video spoofs than you can shake a braided rope of garlic at.

Rabid fans of Stephenie Meyer’s book series flew into theaters all weekend, adding up to a $70.5 million U.S. box office tally so far.

Thus, we are in for more online videos in praise and in mockery of Edward and Bella than perhaps even Alaska Governor Sarah Palin engendered.

Here’s one of the oh-so-serious “Twilight” trailers, followed by one of the better spoofs–by Evil Iguana Productions–below it:

At least Yahoo got one day of stock euphoria, on the news that its CEO, Jerry Yang, was stepping down, before Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped yet another bomb on the troubled Internet giant by saying once more with feeling that he is not at all interested in buying it.

Yahoo (YHOO) stock plummeted on the news, dropping below $10 a share to close at $9.14, down $2.41 or an astonishing 21 percent.

While lack of interest in acquiring Yahoo is a sentiment that Ballmer has expressed more times than Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin said “maverick” in the presidential campaign, Wall Street continues to hold out hope that Microsoft might swoop in and make a new takeover bid for all of Yahoo.

It will not. Let’s repeat. It. Will. Not.

Thus, an obviously frustrated Ballmer reiterated his nondesire for Yahoo at Microsoft’s annual shareholders meeting, near its Redmond HQ today.

“We are done with all acquisition discussions with Yahoo,” Ballmer said. “We did our best…we’ve moved on.”

And so should investors, stock analysts and hedge fund vultures, who actually contact BoomTown on a daily basis, asking if when I wrote that Microsoft (MSFT) was not interested in buying Yahoo, I actually meant that it was interested.

Not interested means, well, not interested, except when it comes to those who wish fervently for a pop in Yahoo stock.

But the only way that is going to happen is slowly, as Yahoo rebuilds its much-battered business, brick by brick. And that presumably will happen when a new CEO is selected to run Yahoo.

Lucky for Yahoo, what Ballmer has repeatedly also said is that he was very interested in (and said again today) a search partnership deal with the company.

Microsoft essentially wants to take over that part of Yahoo’s business and will likely give it a pretty penny to do so. For all its troubles, Yahoo remains the No. 2 search player, well behind Google (GOOG), but well ahead of Microsoft.

Microsoft execs think grabbing Yahoo’s business will help it gain on Google–good luck with that, but it gets an A for effort!

And it also hopes another reorganization of its digital businesses will help it do so.

Right now, for example, newly annointed digital exec Yusuf Mehdi is deep in the midst of a restructuring of his division.

Mehdi’s online services portfolio at Microsoft now includes marketing, online audience business development and product management for MSN and the search properties, but divisions and execs are being shifted around.

But the big news, of course, will be the person Ballmer selects to be Mehdi’s boss, as well as the boss for Satya Nadella, the SVP who heads engineering for Microsoft’s search, portal and advertising platform group, and for Brian McAndrews, the SVP for the advertiser and publisher solutions group.

While Ballmer has taken his sweet time in picking someone, after Kevin Johnson left his post overseeing the division in late July, sources inside and outside Microsoft have told me the company is very close to picking a new head.

That would be a good thing since Ballmer has worn out his Rolodex trying–he has been turned down by many, including former Yahoo CEO Dan Rosensweig.

While I am trying to ferret out the current choice, sources said the main candidate is more technically oriented and is well known in Silicon Valley.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

As BoomTown has noted, one of the best things to come out of this election has been the very funny and very topical humor that has been on "Saturday Night Live" in this political cycle.

Headlined by Tina Fey's perfect impression of Republican VP candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the offerings from the comedy television show has been biting without stooping to the rank meanness from so many other places by both sides.

Last night, Republican Presidential candidate John McCain--who has been on SNL before (his "John McCain Sings Barbra Streisand" skit was really a gem from that appearance)--was in two skits on the show and did a great job in both.

The first was a really clever opening sketch in which he and Fey as Palin appeared on the QVC cable shopping network, sheepishly explaining that they could not afford to buy time on the major networks as Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama did last week.

Money quote from McCain: "I'm a true maverick, a Republican without money."

Along with a set of "John McCain Pork Knives" and "McCain Fine Gold" (with Cindy McCain as the comely demoer), Fey (as Palin) goes rogue and starts selling "Palin in 2012" T-shirts.

In a second appearance on "Weekend Update," McCain did another nice turn, running through a series of new strategies to win, such as "The Sad Grandpa" and the "The Reverse Maverick."

Here are the videos:

Opening QVC Sketch

Weekend Update

Once again, it is likely to be more popular online than on television, as it has been for all of the sketches, a striking trend for the long-running comedy show.

Now, the Democratic side–which has been overwhelmingly more active in creating funny online videos–is back with yet another political spoof.

This time, it is via pranking on boy bands like ‘N Sync and New Kids on the Block with a new one. Of course, the group is called Boybama.

Singing to white independent women, Boybama’s song, “Battleground for Your Heart,” is oddly catchy.

Here’s the video:

Republican Vice Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin did a very smooth--if a tiny bit sweetly awkward--job in her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" last night.

It was a good decision to go low-key and also do a bit of stunt casting by bringing in Mark Wahlberg, who was mocked in an impersonation last week by SNL, and also Alec Baldwin.

The well-known liberal actor did a nice turn pretending to insult Palin, while thinking she was his "30 Rock" co-star Tina Fey, whose many turns at impersonating Palin have become a huge Internet hit.

Palin came on again later in the NBC television comedy show on its "Weekend Update," rocking out to a perfect rap by a very pregnant Amy Poehler.

These two from SNL will surely be the biggest Web video hits this week.

And, goodness gracious, do Palin and Fey really look alike, passing by each other at the end of the opening skit without speaking.

Sometimes politics can be really ugly and sometimes silly--and this time Palin managed to poke fun at herself without being either.

You betcha' she did.

Here's the two videos from last night and also the other three that already aired on SNL:

Opening:

Weekend Update Palin Rap:

VP Debate:

Interview with NBC's Katie Couric:

With Sen. Hillary Clinton:

As former Disney CEO and online video investor Michael Eisner said in a recent onstage Q&A appearance about what works for video on the Web: “Sex seems to work. User-generated, sports, news, anything with Sarah Palin works.”

Indeed, anything with Sarah Palin.

Besides the huge amount of spoof humor videos that have popped up everywhere, both professional and amateur, as well as the explosive number of viewings of online videos of Tina Fey impersonating the Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska governor.

Here is the latest Internet effort, an unusual interactive site called PalinAsPresident in which you click on various items in the Oval Office, where Palin is sitting behind the desk, to hear funny remarks from her.

Click on a globe and you hear “SomethingStan.” Click on a poster for the film, “Maverick,” and you hear, naturally, “maverick.” Of course, there is a pit bull wearing lipstick inside the desk.

Keep clicking on the door and you get three different images. But don’t click on the deer the third time–trust me, it is much worse than the fate that befell Bambi’s mom.

Also, don’t click the red phone twice, or it’s curtains for us all. As the spoof Palin says: “Uh-oh!”

The third time is charming, in fact, as has been every appearance on "Saturday Night Live" by Tina Fey impersonating Republican vice presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

This one, of course, is on last week's debate between Palin and Democratic VP candidate, Sen. Joe Biden, with Queen Latifah also doing a perfect double-taking turn as moderator Gwen Ifill.

Whatever happens in the election, of the many impersonations on "SNL," Fey's of Palin is a classic, which started with a striking resemblance and has turned into a perfect union of characters.

Here is the first, with Fey and Amy Poehler as Sen. Hillary Clinton and Fey with Poehler playing CBS's Katie Couric.

Here's the new video:

If you are feeling bad about the tech stock meltdown yesterday, this spoof–the second hysterical one from the comedy television show–video by Tina Fey as Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin will make you feel much better.

I am only a millimeter away from writing in “Fey for President” on my ballot for this perfect impression, although Amy Poehler’s take as the pompous Katie Couric of CBS is Fey’s perfect foil (as she was when playing Sen. Hillary Clinton the week before).

The best line was actually from Poehler: “It seems to me that when cornered, you become increasingly adorable. Is that fair to say?”

It’s fair to say this pair does, without crossing the line to rank meanness like a lot of political satire.

Here’s the video:

What a lousy week for the digital GOP.

First, John McCain’s domestic policy adviser conjures up a PR disaster by crediting the senator with the development of the Blackberry–odd, since McCain’s not exactly a digital native. Then former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s not qualified to run HP. And now, Palin’s Yahoo email account has been hacked and its contents published to Wikileaks. Serves her right for using Yahoo Mail.

What at astonishingly tech-savvy presidential ticket. Keystone Kops on the campaign trail.

The McCain-Palin campaign and Yahoo (YHOO) haven’t yet confirmed the authenticity of the hack or the published emails, but Amy McCorkell, a member of Alaska’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, tells Wired that one of her messages to Palin is among those posted to Wikileaks.

An ugly turn of events for Palin, who’s been criticized recently for using her Yahoo Mail account to conduct official government business. Uglier still if the deletion of Palin’s Yahoo accounts is considered an obstruction of justice.

UPDATE: McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis just issued the following statement on the matter: “This is a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment.”

That response would seem to resolve the authenticity issue. Now whom do we have to bomb to get those emails off the Web?