I am here at Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale, Calif., to check out “Product Runway,” which is the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s attempt to show that it can still innovate.

First and foremost is the launch of Livestand, a personalized news reader that is similar to Flipboard and a variety of other rivals, including — soon — Google.

It’s Yahoo’s attempt to present a business-as-usual feel — amidst a long and agonizing and very public strategic overview that might also include the sale of the company (or not!), in the wake of the recent firing of its last CEO, Carol Bartz.

It has caused a lot of trauma inside Yahoo, which can’t help with innovation.

But we press on!

In other words, despite the three-ring circus going on outside, Yahoo wants you to know it is still hard at work.

We begin:

10:35 am: As the strains of U2 die out, Yahoo Chief Product Officer Blake Irving takes the stage, which is actually set up in the company’s cafeteria. I can smell lunch being made nearby and I am hungry.

Apt — Yahoo certainly needs to show off a lot of cool stuff or its fate will be cooked.

No pressure, Blake!

“Personally, I am more bullish on Yahoo today,” he said. “What is Yahoo? Simple. It’s the premier digital media company. Period. Stop.”

Oh, if it were only that easy.

10:46 am: Irving pulls out his favorite slide, which looks like a chemistry test. It lists the various elements of the product strategy, with things like personalization, mobile, premium.

Now to Livestand, which is available on the Apple iTunes app store right now.

Don’t all rush at once!

Irving notes that Livestand is more than just an app — it is a platform.

In other words, Yahoo wants to help publishers publish online. Kind of a Facebook of content.

If Yahoo can pull it off, that is. (And, of course, unless Facebook decides to do the same.)

10:50 am: Livestand is an HTML5 “personalized living magazine.”

“This is the way Web pages are going to look,” declares Irving. Which is to say, heavy on photos, swoopy navigation, a television screen-like interface.

Irving uses the example of Surfer magazine, which is a good idea since waves always look pretty. Especially in a video-in-frame with Kelly Slater in Hawaii.

But, in essence, for anyone who has used Flipboard for years now, none of this is entirely different.

10:54 am: The look of what would be the Yahoo News page is actually much more interesting, since it is clearly a whole lot better than the Web page.

Irving also shows off a “living ad” — in this case, an unusually snuggly couple on a couch. It is cool, but creepy.

When launched, the ad has tap points. Irving — naughtily declaring about what is an ad, “I’ll tap that” — taps the lady’s butt, which would also have been my move. We learn about the jeans, of course.

10:58 am: Irving then shows off the ability to add feeds.

Next, something called “Cocktails.” First up, a developer tool called Yahoo Mojito and Yahoo Manhattan, which is a hosting service. The company will open-source both the technologies in 2012.

Irving brings up Mike Kerns, VP of Personalization & Social, who came to Yahoo when it bought the innovative sports fan site called Citizen Sports.

“We like to ship sh#t,” he notes. I like Mike Kerns immediately.

Kerns intros C.O.R.E. No, it is not a secret government organization that takes out fussy bloggers, who might be more critical than Yahoo execs would like.

In fact, it stands for “content optimization relevance engine.” Of course it does.

Simply put, C.O.R.E. is trying to link the right content or whatever to the right consumers and who likes what. Ladies like this, dudes like this. Apparently, “men of multiple ages” enjoy stories about golden chicken.

11:11 am: Kerns is moving on to social, especially its integration with Facebook. While much touted, sources tell me it has gone slower than expected in terms of use, but that it is improving.

Kerns talks about the idea of matching content to conversations to interests and, well, you know — the now exhausting world of modern media consumption.

The world in which you can no longer simply read an article and enjoy it — you must comment, share, discuss, parse, tweet.

Does anyone remember when you read something cool and just kept it to yourself?

Forget it, pal! It is a full-information society now and you better get on board and start poking your friends about every little thing.

(Personally, I plan on becoming a hermit in 3 … 2 … 1.)

11:18 am: Now Tim Parsey, who is Yahoo’s design head. He is hands down the most delightful exec the company has had in a while, mostly because he loves to smirk adorkably.

He shows off Yahoo’s first original design, which was a dull list. And then another really bad logo. But Parsey loves it! It’s kitschy!

Smirk attack!

Parsey moves into what has to happen now, which is to deliver a much more emotional experience and a much better designed one. He uses words like “humanism.”

Say what? He is right — Yahoo has for too long completely ignored design as an important part of the experience.

That’s why Flipboard was so quickly touted — it was pretty and fun. And it is why everyone is simply forced to love Apple products.

11:22 am: Parsey even has a code for it, called REM — for rational, emotional and meaningful.

He shows off a weather app. People take photos and they can be used in the app. Then Yahoo Mail for the iPad, whic is also handsome with photos and video. Livestand, also pretty.

“Great way to differentiate,” says Parsey. He calls it “one Yahoo!” Indeed.

11:35 am: I’ll admit it. After Parsey-fest, I zoned out for a sec when IntoNow dude, Adam Cahan, comes up.

Donut emergency!

Back to IntoNow, it’s the television indexing service that Yahoo bought in April.

Essentially, more ways to watch the media — in this case, video — and do 53 other things at the very same time. Memo to humanity: We will all be paying continuous partial attention for the rest of eternity.

Like I said: Hermitage!

11:41 am: Product dude Irving is back, making a point that, despite all the public mishegas, Yahoo has been busy at innovating.

A redo of email, better search, social “Facebar” with Facebook, Flickr for Google Android.

Irving is correct — Yahoo’s engineers have been hard at work and deserve kudos for doing so, even with attrition issues, stock declines and questions about the company’s very future being debated daily.

The problem is that too many of these improvements are mostly incremental and essentially table stakes for tech companies, most of whom have introed many more significant innovations in the same time frame as Yahoo has.

Google did Android, Google+ (as well as some notable failures). Microsoft did Kinect, Windows Phone, Windows 8. Amazon did Kindle Fire. Facebook did a range of major updates, as it has grown like a weed.

And there’s Apple. You might have heard of the iPhone and the iPad.

You get my point. Yahoo’s Product Runway today is well done, but what it really needs to be is just the beginning of a take-off.

11:48 am: Now Q&A time.

The first question is what took so long to get Livestand out, the second is why should people use Livestand since Flipboard and others have already been around for a dog’s age.

I ask about design — mostly because I want Parsey to use the word “delicious” a lot — and also about all the turmoil around the company and its impact on product creation. (I decide not to mention that Yahoo blew its acquisition of the bookmarking site, Delicious, and then sold it.)

Parsey delivers on the delicious scale, noting that Yahoo must have one design experience and yet has a lot of different interfaces. In other words, it cannot be Apple, but it can feel a lot more cohesive.

Irving talks a little bit around the obvious elephant in the room — the future of Yahoo — noting that the product staff was trying to focus and forget the storm going on outside.

“We have dreams about what this company can be,” says Irving.

You and me both, brother.

12:04 pm: More questions that are too detailed for my tastes, since they have delivered lunch and I can see it and I am ravenous.

As Parsey might say: It looks deliiiiiccccious.

Now, let’s hope Yahoo can do even more tasty stuff.

Maybe because it is a Friday in August, it’s natural that the Apple iPhone 5 rumors would get jacked up again.

Today, it was an erroneous report that Apple would hold a media event on Sept. 7, which was soon countered by another post by Jim Dalrymple of The Loop that said the company would not.

The second is the right one, because — as John Paczkowski has previously written — October is when Apple plans to launch its next-gen iPhone.

Several sources we have rechecked with today underscored that the later time frame — some had thought Apple would launch its latest products sometime in September, as they had done in previous years — was accurate.

There are always a myriad of rumors around the exact dates of basic events for Apple, a company which attracts an unusual amount of attention from consumers and the media, unlike any other tech company.

As we noted in our report, which many have also written about, “the iPhone 5 will use the faster A5 processor on which the iPad 2 runs, a Qualcomm dual mode GSM/CDMA baseband, and a higher resolution eight-megapixel rear camera.”

Apple will also unveil its iCloud offering to consumers then too, which it has already released to developers in beta.

So for now, we’d like everyone to go back to their beach chairs and chillax to the haunting work of one of Apple’s favorite bands — U2 — called, of course, “October”:

The technology and media investor – which counts U2 front man Bono as a managing director – signed a letter of intent to buy a stake in a secondary sale from existing shareholders, a person familiar with the deal confirmed. TechCrunch reported the deal earlier.

The deal still has some time to ferment as the shareholders have a right of first refusal. The transaction is expected to move past that point within a month, the source said. The size of the deal and current valuation of Pandora, a darling among techies, wasn’t immediately available.

Pandora and several of its investors declined comment. The company raised $35 million in June, giving it a total of at least $56 million in venture backing, according to VentureWire, from Greylock Partners, Crosslink Capital, DBL Investors, Hearst Corp., King Street Capital, Labrador Ventures, Selby Ventures and Walden Venture Capital.

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BoomTown took the corporate All Things Digital jet–aka Virgin America, seat 10A–up to Redmond, Wash., today to attend Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, which also includes a passel of media drones like me.

I will be liveblogging the event all day, which is essentially a cavalcade of top execs from the software giant taking the stage and showing off their wares.

There should be a little bit of swanning, since Microsoft (MSFT) turned in very good financial results last week, posting a huge increase in earnings and revenue due to the uptick in PC sales and the intro of the Windows 7 operating system. Losses at its Online Services division remained high, so thank goodness for servers and tools!

Here we go:

8:15 am PT: I was late due to the completely confusing streets of suburban Redmond, all of which look exactly alike, as does every building on Microsoft’s sprawling campus. I am a streets of San Francisco girl, obvi.

In the Conference Center, though, things had not started well past the 8 am start time, as we await the entry of investor dude Bill Koefoed.

U2′s “Beautiful Day” was playing over the sound system, which it was not up here in the Pacific Northwest this morning–it was kind of cold and gloomy, a la “Twilight”–but hopefully will be for sparkly Microsoft execs. We’ll see!

Finally, Koefoed came out and started in on feedback, touting the newly renovated investor relations site, which he is “pretty proud of.” It is nice looking, as are most of Microsoft’s hand-out materials.

In fact, he sent me an excited note last week, because I posted Microsoft’s pretty fourth-quarter slides.

Dear Bill: You need much better things to get excited about! Like the new Magic Trackpad from Apple (AAPL)! Wait, I mean Windows Phone 7!

Koefoed moved quickly to point out last week’s strong results, which is no surprise. When you’ve got lemonade, make more lemonade!

Then he outlined the various Microsoft’s eight “core” businesses, such as Xbox, Bing, Microsoft Office, Windows Azure and, of course, Windows, that the company will be going over.

That’s a lot of core, isn’t it?

Some questions to be answered: Business PC refresh and share momentum? Impact of iPad/slates? Windows 7 phone? Expense control?

Beautiful or not, it was going to be a looooong day.

8:42 am: A jaunty Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO, bounded out. He tried to get the crowd more lively, but this was not to be unless there was a lot more coffee.

I had great hopes for a goofy quote this morning from Turner, who declared at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference earlier this month about Apple’s antenna controversy: “It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that.”

I don’t know about you, but insulting a competitor by shooting off your own foot is a gift that keeps on giving to me.

In any case, Turner said Microsoft was now “leading with the cloud,” a move that the company had been resisting in the past. Now: All in!

He outlined all the various services for business customers. “We are the market leader in cloud services for business,” said Turner, noting Microsoft had been too quiet about the inevitable move of data and software services to big services in the digital sky.

(Actually, in its secret heart, Microsoft was hoping this whole Internet thing would go away and it would be back to a PC on every desktop, but that horse has left the barn, so it’s cloud time!)

Next up for Turner: The much deserved popularity of Windows 7. Of course, since Vista was Microsoft’s Antennagate–except much, much, much worse–it was not hard to be better.

Turner then moved on to bashing Google (GOOG) and other competitors. Turner put up some quotes from Jaguar employees, after the car company switched to Google for email and other services.

One said Google was like vinyl seats. Ziiiiing!

Next Turner victim: VMware (VMW)! He claimed its products were pricier and not cloudy enough.

As for Linux: Meh!

Oracle (ORCL): Customers don’t want to be locked into the land of Larry Ellison!

Cisco (CSCO): Just you wait, John Chambers!

9:19 am: Turner headed off and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie started in on his speech, titled “Reimagining Microsoft’s Future.”

That would be the client plus the cloud, natural user interface and something he called “working on your behalf.”

Mundie launched into his future-dude schtick, but he’s not exactly Alvin Toffler, so I started desperately mainlining the caffeine.

He talked about movable data centers, the “Internet of Things” and other cloud innovations, but there is no new idea here to blow your mind.

Is it too much to wish Mundie would talk about an invisibility cloak? Instead, it was the orchestration of data authority.

That will apparently be a new data marketplace product, codenamed Dallas, to shop for giant data sets and more.

Mundie than showed off some personalization-driven features in the Bing search service, which are also not new concepts.

For example, he showed a menu, embedded in a table, that might know what you like to eat at a particular restaurant you frequent.

This is what would be on my table and there is no need of a fancy computer table to know this: Donuts, donuts, donuts.

Speaking of which, FAM minions: Where the heck were my donuts?

Mundie then moved onto Kinect, once called Project Natal, the actually cool gesture interface for gaming that will be available for Xbox soon.

Finally, he finished up with a video clip of a medical triage assistant. Great, even less customer service from hospitals. The demo was flatly freaky.

The morning session wrapped up with a visit to the technology showcase to “expect the unexpected,” although I was not expecting that in any way, and then it was off to lunch.

Next up in the afternoon session: CEO Steve Ballmer at 1 pm PT.

Google’s (GOOG) video site says it has collected 11,000 questions from its viewers and will ask a small fraction of them during a live sit-down with the president at 1:45 Eastern. No word on who’s actually going to deliver the queries to POTUS, but YouTube insists that “neither the President nor his staff will know which questions will be asked ahead of time.”

The YouTube part aside, there’s not a ton of novelty here: Asking citizens to send in questions for a political Q&A isn’t a new idea. The fact that the Q&A will be streamed live is more interesting to me, since it signals the site’s increasing interest in real-time events (see, for instance, U2).

Today’s Q&A did prompt me to scan YouTube for something apposite, but disappointingly, clips from Bill Clinton’s MTV “choose or lose” appearance are hard to find. And I can’t find any version of Tabitha Soren’s famous “boxers or briefs” query. Did turn this one up, though:

In a press release that just crossed the wire, Yelp said it received $25 million in Series E funding from Elevation Partners, the private equity firm known for its connection with U2 lead singer Bono and its investment in smartphone maker Palm Inc. (PALM). The Yelp deal also includes a provision in which Elevation Partners would buy up to $75 million of stock from “vested employees and other eligible shareholders.”

Yelp, which The Wall Street Journal and others reported had received an acquisition offer worth at least $500 million from Google Inc. (GOOG), has previously raised $30 million from venture firms including Benchmark Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners and DAG Ventures.

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A Los Angeles federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction against BlueBeat, a California-based site that had briefly sold the band’s music, arguing it used “psycho-acoustic simulation”–basically, making a note-for-note recording of the band’s recordings–to make the songs its own.

The same judge had already issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of music label EMI Music Group against the site earlier in the month and had scheduled a hearing for Friday, Nov. 20. But this ruling cancels out the hearing and by any reasonable standard should end the case.

Then again, this whole story has been a head-scratcher from the start, so who knows? Maybe the BlueBeat guys will try an even more preposterous argument down the road.

Part of me thinks that the whole thing may be some sort of Negativeland/U2 hack/stunt/performance art piece. Or maybe there were a lot of mood-altering substances involved. Or maybe it’s part of a conspiracy to create work for copyright lawyers.

Whatever. I’ve embedded the court ruling below, if you insist on reading it. But here’s a clip of Richard Pryor reading the alphabet on “Sesame Street,” which is just as edifying and much more entertaining.

bluebeat beatles suit –

You get a lot of video streams. Close to 10 million, says YouTube, adding that Sunday’s live Webcast of U2′s Rose Bowl concert was the single largest event it has streamed so far.

Granted, Google’s (GOOG) video site only started streaming live events last year, and doesn’t do them very often. But this was a pretty good muscle-flexing event, and by all accounts it went pretty well–I read some gripes about the site limiting transfer speeds, but many more raves about the quality of picture and sound.

That 10 million number, spread out over two-plus hours, doesn’t really tell us how many people watched the concert or how many did so concurrently. YouTube’s first attempt at live streaming, its weird “YouTube Live” concert/award show, may have attracted a peak audience of 700,000.

For some context, consider that last week’s episode of “The Mentalist” on CBS (CBS) drew 11.8 million viewers, which made it the 20th-ranked show in the U.S. But the fact that YouTube is even playing in the same league gives you a sense of the site’s reach.

And recall that YouTube boasted this month that it is now streaming more than one billion streams per day, which means that the overwhelming majority of its users were watching something other than Bono and company on Sunday.

You can see an amazingly high-quality version of the concert here, though it isn’t embeddable. But here’s a clip of a fake U2 concert from a couple of years ago.

That’s the core of Twitter’s pitch, of course, and it has helped the microblogging service raise $155 million, a $1 billion valuation, and forge partnerships with Google (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT). Not surprisingly, investors are looking to place money on related bets, from search engines that parse real-time data to location-based social networks with real-time updates, and even real-time photo-sharing sites.

The newest entrant: Hot Potato, a buzzy start-up that’s supposed to let users converse about a particular event, whether they’re attending it in person or watching from afar. When it’s up and running, that is. The five-man crew doesn’t have users or a product just yet.

But that hasn’t prevented the Brooklyn, N.Y-based company from raising about $1 million, sources say, in a round led by First Round Capital and RRE Ventures. A group of smaller investors, including Betaworks, the incubator that specializes in real-time companies, and Ron Conway, the angel investor best known for his Google bet, are also backing the company.

Hot Potato is led by Justin Shaffer, an eight-year veteran of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, pro baseball’s well-regarded Web unit. Shaffer has recruited three other MLB.com employees (one of whom subsequently left to get an MBA at MIT) to join him.

Shaffer wouldn’t comment about his funding round, but was willing to discuss his start-up’s general plans. They are finishing an iPhone app and plan to submit it to Apple (AAPL) in the next few weeks, he said, and will open their doors once that’s approved.

The big idea is an interesting one. People are already using Facebook and Twitter to converse about events in real time–think about Barack Obama’s inauguration, or Balloon Boy, or last night’s Yankees-Angels game.

Shaffer’s critique of those platforms, though is that “they break at scale–there’s no good way to filter the chatter so that  you, your friends, and a group of strangers with something relevant to say can all connect. Hot Potato, he says, will offer a “curated stream” in real time of all the data coming out of the event in real time. What we’re really focused on doing is bringing together the entire audience of an event, whether they’re at the event or watching at home.”

Business model? TBD, of course. But there are a couple of obvious ways to go. For instance, Shaffer thinks people who opt-in to a particular conversation–say, about an NFL game or a U2 concert–would be okay with seeing “in-stream” ads, as long as they were relevant.

But that’s a problem that’s best tackled once the service is up and running. We’ll check back then.

The Sony (SNE) album, titled “I Dreamed a Dream,” goes on sale on Nov. 23. Ms. Boyle sang the song by the same name on “Britain’s Got Talent,” and the video of her unexpectedly strong performance made her a world-wide phenomenon after it landed on video-sharing sites like YouTube.

Amazon announced the pre-order milestone Wednesday, noting that her advance sales have exceeded those for such stars as Norah Jones, U2, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay. It also created a “store” for Ms. Boyle that includes her breakthrough clip in addition to a link to buy the $10 album.

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Caraeff is already heading up Vevo on an interim basis, but right now he’s still holding down his old job as executive vice president of UMG’s eLabs unit. At some point later this year, he is “99.99 percent certain” to be named president of the video site, according to someone familiar with Universal’s thinking. No word on who will get his old job.

That’s a good start for Vevo, which you can think of as either a “Hulu for music,” or more practically, “YouTube Music,” since the project will move videos at the world’s biggest music company from the world’s biggest video site and onto the new venture.

Running a start-up will be a new role for Caraeff, but at least he knows digital music and UMG specifically–he’s been working there since 2005. Prior to that, he ran wireless for Sony’s (SNE) movie arm.

Just as important, the appointment means Vevo will at least have cleared one hurdle that tripped up News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace, which announced its plans to start a music site in the April 2008 but couldn’t land a CEO for the venture until MTV vet Courtney Holt took the gig in November–a couple months after the site launched.

There’s plenty for Caraeff to do: In addition to overseeing the launch of the site itself, he’ll need to staff it–while Google (GOOG) is helping Universal build and power the site, Caraeff will need to hire a “couple dozen people,” says a source familiar with his plan. A big priority: Assembling a sales force to sell the video clips.

And then? Plenty of other questions, which I raised a month ago when the deal was first announced. Forgive me, but I’m just going to quote myself here:

And even if Google’s technical expertise makes it easier for UMG to get a decent site up and running, neither company has a real track record when it comes to getting big brands to pony up for video ads, which is supposedly the whole point of the site.

Lots of people made similarly disparaging remarks about Hulu, of course. There was no way that GE’s (GE) NBC and News Corp.’s (NWS) Fox were going to be able to launch a decent site, let alone provide a challenge to YouTube. But they did, and they are. So the Vevo folks have that example to inspire them. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

But even if UMG gets the site off the ground, there is a considerable risk for both the label and for Google. Because if it works, Vevo will be diverting a lot of eyeballs away from YouTube–yesterday’s press release boasted that UMG’s YouTube channel has racked up 3.5 billion views.

The idea is to provide advertisers with a clean, well-lit space that will make them feel comfortable enough to spend money. But part of YouTube’s appeal is that is a riot of  the good, the bad and the WTF? You may start out watching a U2 video, and 20 minutes later end up watching a clip of a doped-up seven-year-old after a visit to the dentist. If you end up at Vevo, you’re going to have be very interested in music videos–and, at least for now, just the ones that Universal owns.

Are there enough video watchers out there to justify a business with some 50+ employees, which is the number I’ve heard Vevo/Universal is looking at? And can Universal figure out how to turn those eyeballs into more money than they’d generate on YouTube itself? Got me. Can’t wait to find out.

But at least it contains every Prince song ever recorded, right? Nope. From what I can tell, the only thing the gadget comes preloaded with is a 15-song, 40-minute concert video.

This wouldn’t even compute in the pre-Lehman era. So what gives?

Unlike other special-edition iPods from U2 and “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, you can’t get this one directly from Apple (AAPL). Instead, you have to buy it bundled alongside a high-end book of Prince photographs produced by Kraken Opus, a British publisher that says its mission is to create the “most epic, stunning, iconic publications ever seen in the world.”

And by Kraken Opus standards, by the way, the Prince book/iPod combo is a steal: The books the company produced for the Arsenal soccer team, for instance, can set you back $6,247–and comes with no gadget of any sort.

I’d love to send you off with a Prince video, but it’s awfully hard to find one on YouTube. His old record label, Warner Music Group (WMG), is feuding with Google (GOOG) and has taken down most of the official clips from the video site. And the artist himself is vigilant about taking down clips he doesn’t approve of. So we’ll have to settle for a few seconds of Stephen Colbert dancing to a golden oldie at the Smithsonian.

Coldplay’s U.S. sales in the first week the album went on sale last June: 721,207. U2′s sales for its first week, which ended yesterday: 483,925.

What gives? I’m not a huge fan of either band, so I won’t opine about the albums’ relative merits. And the most obvious answer is that CD sales drop every year, so a big album in 2008 is be a smaller album in 2009.

But I will note that Coldplay got a huge push from Apple (AAPL) last year, which promoted the band over and over and over again on TV ads.

U2 has been working its disc very hard, too–most notably, a week-long stint on David Letterman’s CBS (CBS) show. But maybe a simple iTunes/iPod spot–like the one the band did a few years ago–could have done the trick.

Album promotion circa 2008:

This weekend, AllThingsD.com is distributing awards for Best Performance in a ToS Slapdown, Fastest Disappearing Subscriber Base, and Best Conference to Attend in February If It’s Cold Where You Live. If all involved keep their remarks on topic, things should move along quickly.

BoomTown followed this week’s Facebook drama from the first rumblings of dissatisfaction (and jaded irony) with the copyright changes in the social network’s Terms of Service on through to full-on rallying cries by the likes of Perez Hilton for mass desertion. The drama ended–for now–with CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s public apology and rollback of the changes. If you don’t speak Facebook, you’ll be relieved to know that BoomTown has provided a handy translation. Also, Yahoo (YHOO) CEO “Hurricane Carol” Bartz found an appreciative audience in BoomTown for her Friday Memos, which discuss topics as closely related as the company’s maybe-impending reorg and Saturday night chick flicks.

MediaMemo noted this week that on the Web, the New York Times really is the paper of record, as it beats the online reach of its print counterparts almost as handily as Gawker Media beats the reach of the Los Angeles Times. And Comcast (CMCSA) is feeling the subscriber pinch–it lost more on the basic end and added fewer on the high-end than analysts expected, which is especially bad news during hard times, when people traditionally cling to their cable as they might cling to a security blanket. Elsewhere in the content wars, Hulu was at the center of some interesting questions: Was the content provider forced off of Boxee by the big cable companies? Why did it disappear from CBS’s (CBS) TV.com? And maybe most interestingly, how can the cable guys build their own Hulus?

Digital Daily reported that Sprint’s (S) subscriber base is shrinking too, though CEO Dan Hesse is optimistic about the future, which includes the debut of Palm’s (PALM) new Pre handset. The company is “bullish” about its potential. Google’s (GOOG) adventures in Italy took an interesting turn this week, wrote Digital Daily. The family pressing charges against four of its executives–in reaction to a video in which classmates taunt their son, who has Down Syndrome–decided to drop them. The court, however, is allowing the case to proceed without the family’s involvement. And U2 learned the hard way this week that all it takes is one leaked digital copy of an album–in this case, their latest effort, “No Line on the Horizon”–to facilitate the distribution of millions of unauthorized copies.

In Personal Tech, Walt Mossberg test-drove Unigo, a new site aimed at providing first-hand info on colleges to students (and parents) during what can be a truly stressful time. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt offered advice on working with Microsoft Publisher documents on a Mac, improving searches with Surf Canyon (even the beta version) and using a smartphone as a modem. In the Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at Trulia.com, which aims to offer an insider’s view of real estate, and in a special MossBlog, Walt and Katie reported from the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona–not a bad place to go in February, especially from Washington, D.C.

More next week.

It’s not the fault of the ISPs, never mind that they are, according to McGuinness, “destroying the recorded music industry” by failing to tackle piracy. Nor is it the fault of Apple (AAPL) and the makers of other digital media players who are wrongly profiting from their “burglary kits.” Nor can it be blamed solely on Silicon Valley and its “entrepreneurial, hippie values,” which in McGuinness’s opinion have bred a deep disregard for the true value of music.

No, it appears there’s no one to blame for this particular cock-up but Universal Music, which mistakenly put the album up for sale earlier this week at getmusic.com.au. It was only available there for a brief period, but there was time enough for fans to buy it legally. Not surprisingly, copies of the record began showing up on torrent indexes a short while later.

An embarrassing turn of events for a band that had gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent exactly this situation from happening. Still, as TechDirt’s Mike Masnick notes, there’s a lesson to be learned here. “At some point, folks in the music industry are going to (finally) recognize a rather simple fact: it just takes one digital copy of a song/movie/whatever to get out there, and it’s everywhere. You can’t stop it. No matter how annoying it is. No matter what laws it violates. It will happen.”

In addition to myriad rock star perks you’ve already heard about, here’s another one to add to the list: Better stock deals. At least when you’re talking about stock in concert promoter Live Nation.

The company spun off from the radio and billboard giant Clear Channel a couple years ago and has been trying to lock up big name artists to exclusive deals by shoveling tons of loot their way. Madonna, U2, Jay-Z and others have gladly accepted pacts that pay them hundreds of millions of dollars to work exclusively with the company.

Some of those payments have been in stock, which is supposed to indicate that the company and the music acts are all in the same boat. And since Live Nation (LYV) shares have gotten pummeled, you’d think those music acts would be hurting too. Nope.

The Wall Street Journal:

Live Nation had guaranteed that U2 would receive $25 million for 1.6 million shares. But the current market value was just $6.1 million at the close of trading Wednesday. That leaves Live Nation on the hook for the balance, which the company said Wednesday in a SEC filing it would pay with cash on hand or borrowed money.

There could be more bad news coming from another of the company’s marquee acts: Madonna. In April, Madonna is eligible to sell $25 million of stock under the terms of her contract, even though the stock’s market value has plunged 83 percent since she struck her deal in October 2007.”

That’s lousy news for Live Nation shareholders. U2′s cash-out put even more pressure on the stock (the company is selling 1.56 million shares of its own to help pay for U2′s deal), and news of the Madonna deal will do the same.

The bigger question is whether Live Nation’s strategy ever made sense: It was supposed to use the big name acts to help it expand beyond the concert business and into other revenue streams… like selling CDs. Understandable why the company wanted to diversify beyond concerts, which are high-risk, low-margin affairs. But signing big acts to big, guaranteed contracts is one of the things that got the music business in the trouble it’s in now.

But let’s give the old music industry some credit: It did bring us some pretty good music. Here’s U2, circa 1983:

Since John Paczkowski is still out of range, Beth Callaghan will post Digital Daily today.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter reports that Microsoft execs have been talking to talent agencies all over Hollywood with the intention of building an exclusive body of original content for the company’s Zune player. Not just standard sitcom fare, either–Zune’s recent update of firmware for the device provides better social functionality, and Microsoft (MSFT) sees this as a move toward the kind of communal functionality pioneered by the XBox multiplayer experience.

Richard Winn, director of entertainment development for Zune, says, “What we would be looking to do with any form of original content is the added component that Zune could provide that iTunes or any competing service couldn’t.”

Great, but will that make a difference, with the Zune market share hovering at 4 percent (compared to Apple at 71 percent)? Probably not. This is the same programming/marketing team, after all, that came up with the idea of launching a Joy Division version of the Zune. Really–Zune users are already lonely; no need to make them sad.

Well, it’s also the team that does the impossible–defying all rumors of extinction and plugging away on a platform no one uses. Maybe while the Zune team is making the rounds, they’ll find out who represents U2.

At the Music Matters confab in Hong Kong, McGuinness slagged broadband Internet service providers, accusing them of aiding and abetting music piracy while CD sales and royalty payments to musicians plunge. “The recorded music industry is in a crisis, and there is crucial help available but not being provided by companies who should be providing that help–not just because it is morally right, but because it is in their commercial interest,” said McGuinness, adding that Internet service providers have been “turning their heads” away from the music industry’s troubles. “One way or another, ISPs and mobile operators are the business partners of the future for the recorded-music business. But they are going to have to share the money in a way that reflects what music is doing for their business. The music business once had to bear the accusation that it was full of dinosaurs who looked back to an old business model rather than embracing a new one,” McGuinness said. “Today, though, it is the music business that is charting the way to the future. If there are dinosaurs around today, I think they are the Internet free-thinkers of the past who believe that copyright is the great obstacle to progress, that the distributors of content should enjoy profits without responsibilities and that the creators and producers of music should simply subordinate their rights to the rights of everyone else.”

By Internet free-thinkers, McGuinness presumably means those crazy longhairs in Silicon Valley whom he accused of destroying the recorded music industry in another keynote address back in January. “Embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music,” he said at the time. “I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away from the individual P2P file thief and on to the multibillion dollar industries that benefit from these countless tiny crimes: the ISPs [internet service providers] the telcos [telecom companies], the device-makers. … We must shame them into wanting to help us. Their snouts have been at our trough feeding free for too long.”

Out of the car, longhair …