A new Silicon Valley business incubator called The Start Project has recruited a high-profile group of entrepreneurs as advisers, which it announced today on its Web site.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, former Google (GOOG) exec and angel investor Chris Sacca, as well as Whiskey Media’s Mike Tatum and Jeffries & Co. Managing Director David Liu, have all agreed to help the company’s start-ups before and during their creation.

The Start Project is the brainchild of serial entrepreneurs Narendra Rocherolle of 83 Degrees, who co-founded a range of companies, and Josh Felser of Spinner and Crackle.

Polaris Venture Partners is also involved, lending office space in San Francisco and possible investments in whatever innovative ideas bubble up, with a first-look option.

“We can do a lot of stuff, such as pairing a CEO with an adviser with an amazing track record,” said Rocherolle in an interview with BoomTown. “It’s kind of a Justice League for start-ups.”

The Start Project’s description of itself on its Web site reads:

“The start project is a collaborative effort to bring great ideas to market. While the founders have a history of successful exits (over half a billion dollars), they are now focused on the initial stages of business creation including: idea generation, software development, product vision, team building, and investment.”

According to sources close to the situation, AOL has been busy selecting the board for the company, which is still set to spin itself off by year’s end–even as it slows down a decision on a new search deal with either current partner Google or a more emboldened Microsoft.

AOL is using Spencer Stuart in the search for directors, led by well-known headhunter Jim Citrin, sources said, and the company has already settled on several outside candidates.

The final board is likely to have about 10 members, and up to a dozen.

At least one of those seats will go to CEO Tim Armstrong, with one or two more claimed by its current corporate owner, Time Warner (TWX).

AOL and Time Warner made their own wish list of potential directors earlier this year, but some people are also lobbying the company to join the board.

BoomTown is working on discovering all those names, but sources added that the candidates being looked at are a mix of personalities culled from the media, advertising and Web worlds.

Among the key attributes: More presumably fast-forward and innovative Silicon Valley types that can help burnish AOL’s tarnished tech cred.

Here are some of my picks:

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Guitar Hero CEO Dan Rosensweig, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg (actually, AOL should buy the start-up), eBay (EBAY) CEO John Donahoe, LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman or CEO Jeff Weiner, Juniper Networks (JNPR) CEO Kevin Johnson, Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings, and former AOL iconic exec Ted Leonsis.

And, just for fun, News Corp. (NWS) digital don (and ousted former AOL head) Jon Miller or former Yahoo President Sue Decker.

(I might also add former AOL exec, Netscape co-founder and all-around entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, but if he joins another tech/Web board, he is going to get splinters.)

That’s because Armstrong has set a strategy centered around the turbocharging of online content, powered by a more flexible platform and paid for by goosing AOL’s graphical advertising business.

This puts the online icon–once a powerhouse and now not so much, having operated inside Time Warner since its merger early in this decade–in more serious competition with Yahoo (YHOO).

Yahoo now dominates content on the Web, with powerful news, sports and finance sites, and has recently been trying to reinvigorate its brand. This week, it launched a new marketing campaign with the motto, “It’s Y!ou.”

Yahoo also recently struck a search technology and advertising partnership with Microsoft (MSFT), which has now aimed its efforts at AOL.

According to sources, Microsoft execs have been aggressively courting AOL to switch its search business from Google (GOOG).

The search behemoth has long been AOL’s partner in what sources at both companies said has been a productive and lucrative relationship.

Armstrong is also a former top exec at Google, which many at the company hope will further cement its chances.

And while the renewal of that deal does not officially need to be struck until late next year, sources add that Google has already prepared and offered what it considers an attractive new deal for AOL.

But, much to Google’s chagrin, with a focus on the spinoff and preparations for some more cost-cutting in the months ahead, AOL has decided not to accept it yet and is not likely to anytime soon.

While hedging the situation in a recent video interview with MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka, Armstrong has also recently met with Microsoft execs, sources said, who have discussed a number of partnership options with him, including a tighter relationship with its MSN content properties.

“There’s no need to rush, especially since there is already a lot on AOL’s plate,” said one source close to the situation. “And, since it has options, AOL is going to take time considering them.”

(For more on Armstrong’s thinking, here’s a link to another video interview I did with Armstrong while both of us were in Germany today, in which he talked about the ad market and AOL’s strategy, but was cagey about being more specific.)

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Burda runs an annual digital conference in Munich called DLD (Digital, Life, Design), which a lot of U.S. tech types have gone to, including me, even though the media giant is best known for its old-line magazines about fashion, cooking and crafts.

But Burda has also been dipping into the digital sector a lot, especially via the tireless tech networking of the company’s Steffi Czerny and Marcel Reichart, who have established a high profile for the company among Silicon Valley denizens.

That was in evidence at Burda’s luncheon yesterday, which was crowded with a panoply of techies and hosted by Czerny, Maria Burda, the wife of CEO and owner Hubert Burda, and well-known Israeli investor Yossi Vardi.

Czerny has been taking Maria Burda (pictured here, she is also a famous German television star, better known as Maria Furtwängler) around the Valley on a learning tour this week to meet with companies like Ning, Mozilla, Facebook, and with venture capitalists. They are also here to attend Google’s Zeitgeist partners’ event, which starts today.

Here’s a video of yesterday’s luncheon, where I was asking everyone about the troubled economic situation and more.

It includes chats with Mullenweg and Seesmic’s Loic Le Meur, BillShrink’s Peter Pham, Facebook’s Brandee Barker and Randi Zuckerberg, Wired’s Steven Levy, Vardi and Burda and Czerny:

The third annual WordCamp San Francisco was held this weekend, bringing together WordPress users and developers to discuss the past, present and future of their favorite Web publishing platform. Since its humble beginnings as a fork of the b2\cafelog blog software in 2003, WordPress has grown to become one of the most popular blog publishing platforms. WordPress.com, the hosted version of WordPress, saw the creation of 2.3 million new blogs this year, with 35 million posts.

My history with WordPress goes back to when it first came on the scene in 2003. I was looking at third-party software to manage my personal Web site, which had outgrown the simple content management system I had written. I initially resisted using WordPress until version 1.5 was released in 2005. What pushed me over the top was the inclusion of static pages in the Strayhorn release. This allowed WordPress to be used as a full-blown CMS instead of just a simple blog platform. Over the next last years, WordPress’s CMS capabilities and versatility have grown to the point where it’s a great choice to power a simple blog, a community of blogs or even a corporate Web site. Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher agree–after all, they chose WordPress to power All Things Digital.

Automattic, the folks behind WordPress, are hard at work this year improving the WordPress experience. As millions more people choose WordPress to power their Web sites, the importance of having automatic updates is becoming very evident. During his State of the Word Address, Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer and public face of WordPress, hinted at a future update mechanism (similar to Mac OS X Software Update or Mozilla FireFox) with which updates to WordPress Core, Plugins, and Themes can be applied in real-time without the user having to upload files or type arcane commands into a Terminal session.

Having been to the previous two WordCamps, I can say that Automattic and the volunteers did a fantastic job organizing the 2008 edition. The new space at the Mission Bay Conference Center was a great upgrade over the previous location. Still, a part of me misses seeing Matt sit in one of those thrones at the Swedish American Hall!

For more information and thoughts on WordCamp 2008 SF, check out the great coverage on Andrew Mager’s blog The Web Life on ZDNet. Finally, to find out more about upcoming WordCamps in your area, visit WordCamp Central.

This week, I had lunch with one of the nicest young Web entrepreneurs around the scene, WordPress Founder Matt Mullenweg.

We use a custom WordPress.com installation for this site, which has worked out well for us, and the start-up also hosts AllThingsD.com. We also got a very nice hoodie.

In all seriousness, the company started as an open-source blogging software project at WordPress.org with Mullenweg as founding developer, while WordPress.com is for-profit and is run by Mullenweg and others at a start-up called Automattic.

Mullenweg came to San Francisco from his hometown of Houston to work on WordPress and other projects for CNET in 2004. He left a year later to work full-time on the development of WordPress.

It and others like it quickly rode the wave of an ever-growing trend of self-publishing, which has been increasingly embraced by both the single person writing about their cat to the large-scale media companies looking to develop more dynamic properties online.

WordPress and Automattic (which also runs Akismet, an anti-comment and trackback spam software service) has been the frequent target of takeover speculation.

But, while Automattic has reportedly considered those options, as well as hooking up with other companies like Sphere (which was just bought for $35 million in cash by AOL [TWX]), Mullenweg seems just as determined to build out his simple publishing platform, by adding ad networks and all sorts of bells and whistles to the offerings.

In fact, WordPress competitor Six Apart did just that last week with its acquisition of the New York-based ad, design and consulting services firm Apperceptive.

So I will bet Mullenweg probably has some news of his own, when he gives a short speech at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this morning.

We’ll see, but in this video, Mullenweg talks with BoomTown–after we admit to an obvious man crush on him–about the progress in the blog-publishing arena and where it is all going.

Here’s the video: