Specifically, the billboard is on 101 southbound in South San Francisco, just north of SFO. It heralds, “Bits: Everything you need to know on the business of technology.”

A spokeswoman for the Times said she didn’t know when the billboard went up, but said it was part of a broader promotion effort after the relaunch of Bits late last year.

Other Web companies who’ve recently bought billboards on Highway 101 in the San Francisco Bay Area include Zynga, Groupon, Box.net and even the young travel search site Hipmunk.

Campaigns on 101 (warning: Locals frown at people who call it “the 101”!) cost an average of $10,000 to $20,000 per month, with some prominent spots costing more than $30,000 per month, said John Laramie, CEO of ADstruc, a DSP for outdoor advertising.

It should be noted that AllThingsD competes with Bits, obvi.

Also, please excuse the cellphone photo through my dirty windshield; I drove to L.A. this weekend and should really take the car in for a wash.

Yesterday, BoomTown headed on down to the metalish-tube-clad HQ of the New York Times (NYT) to pay a visit on “Bits” head blogger Nick Bilton.

Bilton, who is one of the few tech reporters with programming cred, brings a geek-flavored sensibility to the newspaper’s online tech coverage.

Consider a recent story about a product called E-mail Classifier with the adorkable lede:

“My e-mail inbox is a dejected, endless morass. It’s a desolate wasteland of unanswered messages that continue to appear like a never ending game of Tetris.”

Happily, the tone of his new book–“I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted”–is much more tech-friendly.

In fact, he said in a chat yesterday, one of its aims is to beat back some of the scarier books blaming the dumbing-down Internet for everything except the BP oil spill.

Here is my video interview with Bilton at the Times’ cafeteria about the book, which comes out in a few weeks: