BoomTown has never set foot in the dusty dustfest in the desert that is Burning Man, due to the lack of a Four Seasons in the vicinity.

Thank goodness, then, for the live stream of the annual event–direct from Black Rock City–which runs from August 30 to September 6.

You can see it below and also on Burning Man’s Web site.

This year’s art theme at the always-innovative user-generated cultural festival, which has a big dollop of digital, is: Metropolis.

As Burning Man notes:

“Great cities are organic, spontaneous, heterogeneous, and untidy hubs of social interaction. At Burning Man 2010, we will inspect the daily course of city life and the future prospect of civilization.”

Indeed! So next year I am definitely going and building a luxury hotel from scratch with the help of my Twitter followers!

Until then, have fun, Joanne–because I will be watching the live-stream video from UStream whilst getting a mani-pedi:

So we sucked it up and headed to see the recently renovated and quite historic hotel, the Shelbourne, as well as the Four Seasons, where we are staying. (Our annual flagship D conference has been held for five years at the Four Seasons Aviara in Carlsbad, Calif., and will be again in late May of 2008.)

Both luxury hotels are obviously lovely, and present different experiences–one more urban and the other slightly out of the city center.

Walt and I are here in Ireland, because our D: All Things Digital conference might be going international.

After our success with our annual flagship D, which just took place for the fifth time in late May (D6 is scheduled be held in late May of 2008), we are deciding whether to expand by adding a new conference outside the U.S.

If we do it, we hope to hold the first one next fall and are strongly considering Dublin as the location of the event, which we are calling EuroD. We like Dublin for a lot of reasons, including its fast-growing tech sector.

So, here is our second video of our efforts to decide where to hold EuroD, if we end up doing it.

And, as at Dublin Castle, the venues are much fancier than we are: