No, really, today Zynga will file for an IPO.

Okay, tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow.

Good lord, the S-1 filing for the online gaming phenom is going to drop in the middle of the Fourth of July BBQ, isn’t it?

In any case, I was interviewed on the streets of New York about Zynga and other frothy stock market topics yesterday by Beet.TV’s Andy Plesser:

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Mark Marvel, who runs video sales for MSNBC.com, won’t identify which show the app will feature/promote or when it will be ready. But Marvel says it will offer up complete episodes, as well as features that allow users to “engage with the host of that show,” among other options. So go ahead and make your own guess about which show that might be. (My hunch: Rachel Maddow would be more popular than Dylan Ratigan.)

“Company X introduces iPad app” wouldn’t really qualify as news at this point except that the TV business is the one industry that hasn’t rushed onto Apple’s (AAPL) new platform.

The Flash/HTML5 imbroglio is (a relatively small) part of the reason. But the real issue here is that programmers haven’t figured out what the iPad means for them: Is it a place to put up free ad-supported video, as they’ve tried to do on the Web? Or can they get away with charging money for their stuff (see: ABC’s free iPad app and Hulu’s nonexistent one)?

In MSNBC’s case, moving to the iPad is even trickier, since cable providers pay the GE (GE) unit a fee to carry its programming. Some programmers, like Viacom (VIA) and MSNBC itself have been able to put that same stuff up for free on their own sites and sell ads against it. But it is a practice that provokes grumbling from the likes of Comcast (CMCSA), which is why you don’t see that much of it.

Marvel, who discussed the company’s plan on a Web video panel hosted by Beet.TV last night, says MSNBC may hear more grumbling when it launches the app. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we hear some pushback from them,” he said. “[But] the fact is that this is going to be testing a new market.”

Larry Kramer, the online journalism pioneer and persistent gadfly, finally took credit where credit is certainly due, in a story he tells of giving me my big break way back in the dark ages.

In a recent video interview with Beet.TV, below, Kramer claims I “scared” him into giving me a stringer job at the Washington Post in the early 1980s.

Apparently, I harangued Kramer, who was then the metro editor, over poor-quality coverage of Georgetown University–where I was an undergraduate–by the august newspaper.

I recall a simple phone request for, you know, accuracy and no misspelling from the Post. But it’s true, its stories were godawful, giving me my first stepping stone.

Thanks, Larry!

Here’s Kramer–who founded MarketWatch–telling his tale of woe:

Here’s a whole lot of video from a panel discussion about the future of online video that BoomTown moderated last week in San Francisco.

Held at the offices of CBS (CBS) Interactive, it was organized by Andy Plesser, the kingpin of Beet.TV, the online video news site. Plesser moderated the second half of the two-hour (!!!) session, and I did the first hour.

One tweet of the event noted: “The Beet.TV just started and @karaswisher is already terrorizing the panelists.”

I beg to differ! I was strafing the giant panel in order to tame it!

The group assembled included Gregg Colvin of News Corp. (NWS) digital unit Fox Interactive, Karin Gilford of Comcast (CMCSA), Revision3′s Jim Louderback, Anthony Soohoo of CBS Interactive, Adobe (ADBE) exec Jennifer Taylor, and many, many others.

Topics included advertising, creative, innovative business models and much more about the online video space.

Here’s the full video, as well as an interview with me about my bad video practices (yes, I look exhausted, but the panel did last forever).

And I added a third video, which is a part of the longer one, in which I asked what devices or companies the panelists thought were the most promising.

The answer, for the most part: Those from Apple (AAPL), including its iPhone, iPod and, even before launch, iPad. Not surprisingly, however, given the Flash feud, Adobe’s Taylor picked the Google (GOOG) Nexus One mobile phone.

Here are the videos:

For those of you who don’t watch CNN or visit CNN.com with any frequency, iReport is the news service’s attempt to create its own user-generated news hub. It’s supposed be to be able attract eyeballs on its own and in some cases, feed the Web site and the cable channel with free content donated by viewers.

To date, iReport is best known as the place where someone posted a bogus item about Apple (AAPL) CEO  Steve Jobs. But CNN says it has been using the site heavily to augment its Iran coverage. From a press release it sent out earlier this week: “Since last week, we’ve received 4555 iReport submissions related to Iran–including more than 1600 this past Saturday and Sunday alone, and an additional 689 just yesterday. To date, 150 of the Iran-related iReports have been vetted and verified by CNN producers for use on CNN air or online–something the likes of YouTube or Flickr just aren’t equipped to do given their lack of newsgathering infrastructure.” (Yesterday CNN told me it added another 399 Iran-related iReports, and that seven had made it onto air. Presumably those numbers are still increasing.)

The breast-beating seems a bit much given that CNN, like every other cable network, has been happy to play up any bit of social media it uses in its Iran reporting. But the point about the vetting and verification is interesting.

I checked with CNN rep Jennifer Martin, who spelled out what that means: That CNN producers have contacted the people who sent in all of the Iran-related iReports it has featured on the network and at least verified that they are who they say they are. That in itself seems worthwhile, and maybe even worth bragging about.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV has more, including an interview with CNN.com producer Lila King.

Here’s an example of some the “verified” footage the network has used so far. For some reason the play/pause/etc. controls don’t show up on these embedded videos, but I’ve been able to get them to start and stop by clicking on the image:

Iranians shouting “Allah O Akbar” at night:

A pro-Mousavi rally:

Can you blame them? That lion is pretty cool. And, it turns out, MSNBC.com viewers like watching that story almost as much as YouTube viewers do: NBC’s site has generated 2.4 million views by talking about the clip, while the original YouTube clip has generated 3.2 million views, says Beet.TV. Happy holidays!

Breaking things down a bit further, Beet.TV reports that MSNBC.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served up some nine million video streams yesterday. Meanwhile, CNN.com counted 27 million unique visitors during election day and 4.9 million live video streams–the most in its history.

Must have been that new holodeck that gave CNN the edge, eh?

Breaking things down a bit further, Beet.TV reports that MSNBC.com received over 20 million unique visitors, nearly 250 million page views, and served up some nine million video streams yesterday. Meanwhile, CNN.com counted 27 million unique visitors during election day and 4.9 million live video streams–the most in its history.

Must have been that new holodeck that gave CNN the edge, eh?

When I was in Manhattan recently, I made a lovely visit to the world HQ of Andy Plesser’s Beet.TV, where we discussed where online video is going.

As some know, this is a big topic for BoomTown this year because the Web is clearly becoming a video-heavy medium.

And the ever-affable Plesser does a solid job covering it. This past week, for example, he looked into everything from the Web sites of the Presidential candidates to Reuters’s (TRI) video reporting of the escalating fighting in the South Ossetian town of Megvrekisi to a Canadian video-sharing site.

Of course, he does a lot of video about it all.

Here is my video interview with him and below it is a video he did with me in New York about the AllThingsD and D empire, right when I was doing the video of him (logrolling in our time!):

At the end, he points to BoomTown’s annoying (and artistic!) work with our little Flip camera as an example of the trend toward the quick and, well, dirty.

Here’s the video:

It is obviously my personal opinion and not that of Dow Jones, but I think I was pretty fair and balanced. Especially given the glamorous Hollywood Boulevard backdrop.