I was on San Francisco’s public radio station today, talking about this past year in tech with “Forum” host Michael Krasny and fellow panelists, former TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy and CNET’s Molly Wood.

2011 was a big year, as it turned out, with good and bad news for companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and others.

We also looked forward to 2012, which will include new online TV efforts and, of course, the much-anticipated Facebook IPO.

Here’s the chat:

Earlier today, TechCrunch Senior Editor Sarah Lacy and I went on Michael Krasny’s Forum show on San Francisco’s KQED public radio station to talk about the Yahoo layoffs earlier this week.

Despite the depressing topic, it was a lively session, which covered a range of issues about the Silicon Valley Internet giant, from its weak morale to the rocky performance of CEO Carol Bartz to the please-fire-yourselves-now board of directors.

During the talk, Lacy declared herself queen, so I dubbed myself a duchess. Thus, we are blog site royalty, which I compared to being the rulers of Latvia.

Sorry, Latvia!

Here’s the show for your listening pleasure (or displeasure, if you are on the how-can-we-miss-you-if-you-won’t-go-away Yahoo board):

This one is about the most underrated and overrated in tech–and somehow I manage to call Facebook both. I also note that while Steve Jobs is not overrated, by any means–so back off, you Mac fanatics–the other key execs at Apple (AAPL) are underrated.

Worst investor? Not even close: The winner is Carl Icahn, who has taken a very long and very cold bath investing in Yahoo (YHOO). Let’s hope he knows something we don’t for 2009.

Here are the other Tech Ticker interview videos I posted yesterday, on what I would give tech execs for the holidays and my likely inaccurate predictions for 2009.

Here’s the latest video:

Given I am still in Buffalo until Wednesday, still chilling (and not in a good way), let’s start the proceedings slowly, with some videos I did with the ebullient Sarah Lacy for Yahoo’s Tech Ticker site right before the holidays at the All Things Digital HQ (i.e., the cozy cottage behind my house).

In the first, below, I look back at 2008 and make predictions for 2009, including demanding that the new administration of President-Elect Barak Obama “fix my broadband!” Also: I copiously praise the stylings of Blake Lively on “Gossip Girl” and her show’s online life.

In the second, below, I play secret Santa to a range of tech figures, doling out virtual presents to Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang, Oracle (ORCL) head Larry Ellison and Apple (AAPL) icon Steve Jobs.

Although the sixth edition of the D: All Things Digital conference last week was chock full of tech and media hotshots, most attendees seemed to like best the rollicking interview Walt Mossberg and I did with News Corp. head Rupert Murdoch.

While News Corp. (NWS) owns this site and the conference–minuscule as we are in the larger Homer-Simpson universe of the sprawling media conglomerate–we tried to interview the feisty mogul in the same way we did anyone else onstage.

You can see highlights of the interview here and also here, as well as the most controversial parts about his interest in the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama here.

And, here is one interview in two parts that I did immediately after the Murdoch interview with host Sarah Lacy on Yahoo’s Tech Ticker:

Here is part one, on the longer interview:

Here is part two, specifically on politics:

OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?

With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.

You know, the new pretty young thing in Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).

You don’t know?

Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).

And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.

But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.

Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?

In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)

At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.

“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.

Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.

But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.

OK, the interview she did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW on Sunday was a little silly at times and she probably annoyed people when she flacked her new book. (Full disclosure: I have written two books, so I can relate to the unfortunate impulse to do so.)

But to make such a big hairy deal in blogs and on Twitters seems a bit of overkill, doesn’t it?

Even including a wee bit too much girly hair-twirling by Lacy into the equation (which looked like simple nervousness to me), I just don’t get the uproar.

If Britney Spears had mounted a mighty steed and ridden naked down Hollywood Boulevard, trampling cute little bunnies as she went–it could happen!–it would not engender the level of vituperative online bloviating that the encounter of Lacy and Zuckerberg did.

Were there no other pointless blogging debates to be had yesterday? Aren’t there indignant Digg-for-sale stories to chew over? Wasn’t there a good open-source kerfuffle to get into angry exchanges about? Didn’t Robert Scoble do something that we can endlessly argue between and amongst ourselves?

I guess not and that’s too bad.

Arrington got it exactly right (except in singling out only journalists for the Lacy-bashing, since it was, well, everyone piling on), when he wrote:

“Perhaps they just got caught up in the fun of a witch burning. But whatever drove them to write those articles, it certainly wasn’t journalism. Nor was it professional. And, worst of all, it wasn’t accurate.”

And Thomas made the most salient point of who should have been the focus of the interview, when he wrote:

“I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy’s Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum onstage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the microscope: Mark Zuckerberg.”

Well, exactly.

I am, in fact, probably going to be interviewing Zuckerberg onstage at our upcoming D: All Things Digital conference in late May. I hope it goes well, but you never know.

But here’s an offer: If everyone promises to stop needlessly pummeling Lacy for her SXSW interview, I’ll consider twirling Zuckerberg’s hair during my interview with him.

Twitter that.

Also, here’s the video of the Lacy-Zuckerberg interview, so you can make your own judgment:

BoomTown broke the news recently about the departure of longtime top exec Owen Van Natta at the hot social-networking site. I also reported on the start-up’s search for a No. 2 exec to back up Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and made some suggestions about possible candidates for the job.

Here’s my talk with Lacy about Facebook management changes:

Some material from AllThingsD appears on Tech Ticker from time to time, linking back to our site. And BoomTown was invited to talk about various topics last week with Lacy, including in this post and video about politics in Silicon Valley.

In the piece, Lacy and I discuss the candidates, as well as issues like ubiquitous broadband access (a critical issue about which I have long maintained the federal government has dropped the ball on spearheading the development of, as it has in the past with other important issues such as the universal telephone service or the federal highway system).

While I am not “longing” for former Vice President Al Gore, as the Tech Ticker post noted, it is still true that he is the most techie of any politician in recent memory.

I Obamapolize, but it’s true! (I also Obamapologize for my weird hair and lack of makeup, but I never appear on camera in BoomTown, so I am not going to when visiting Sunnyvale, Calif.)

Also below it is the hour-plus interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Sen. John McCain last May at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, at a time when he was considered the longest of long shots for the Republican presidential nomination.

So much for predictions!