BoomTown’s week began onstage in front of thousands of chanting women. No, Kara wasn’t filling in for Oprah; she was doing something much cooler.

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The week ending Aug. 21 began Aug. 17 with another round of digital musical chairs–BoomTown reported that David Dickman, VP of West Coast sales for Yahoo, will be leaving the company at the end of the month for Warner Bros. to work in digital sales. Also, after a five-month tour of Europe and its finer Web establishments, Yahoo seems poised to name a new international head.

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QOTD

“We intend to charge for our news Web sites. The Wall Street Journal‘s WSJ.com is the world’s most successful paid news site and we will be using our profitable experience there and the resulting unique skills throughout News Corp. to increase our revenues from all our content. Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. The increase we have seen in our Wall Street Journal subscriptions since we acquired the paper proves to me that the market is willing to pay for that quality without any special market.”

– News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch vows to charge for online content.

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Looks like News Corp. was a little too optimistic when the company told investors in May that it expected a decline of around 30 percent in fiscal-year-adjusted operating income. Reporting earnings this afternoon, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and this Web site instead posted a decline of 32.5 percent.

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In August 2008, Facebook claimed 100 million monthly active users worldwide. By April 2009, it doubled that number. Today, the social networking outfit tells us it has reached 250 million monthly active users. Fifty million new users in under four months: Impressive.

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It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.

According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft-Yahoo deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown also wondered whether Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz on his trip to the Bay Area this week, or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination.

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Took ’em long enough. After weeks of rumor and speculation, Walt Disney Co. has finally taken a stake in Hulu, the video-streaming site operated by NBC Universal, News Corporation and Providence Equity Partners. Financial terms and the structure of the deal weren’t disclosed, but sources say Disney’s stake in the venture will be 27 percent.

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In Silicon Valley, it’s hard to believe that not everyone follows each shiny new thing on the Web, tracks OS versions as intently as the storyline for “Battlestar Galactica” and remains jacked-in pretty much 24/7. But it’s been known to happen.
For instance, BoomTown was in Rome earlier this week attending a conference on business, brand and innovation that happens only once every seven years–and one of the biggest takeaways? Hardly any Italians have heard of Twitter, and those who have don’t really use it.

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Much ado about the Amazon Kindle 2.0 this week:

After its official unveiling on Feb. 9, the e-book reader started shipping on Monday, and actually managed to grab much–but not all–of the hype that’s surrounded Twitter of late. The device has been met with much acclaim, though it’s by no means unanimous.

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What spreads faster than economic gloom and doom, and is more infectious than professional anxiety? That phenomenon known as “25 Things.” Just in time for Facebook’s fifth birthday, the record-breaking waste of time may have reached critical mass this week. Elsewhere this week…

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So TiVo’s on-again, off-again relationship with DirecTV? It’s on again. After ditching the TiVo platform in Feb. 2007 for a competing personal video recorder made by sister company NDS Group, DirecTV has circled back to embrace the PVR pioneer’s platform once again.

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As the lines between television and the Internet grow increasingly blurry, online video services are seeing quite a bit of audience growth. Predictably, YouTube has been top among them. The company served up five billion video streams to some 77 million unique users in July, according to Nielsen Online, which ranked it as the top Web brand for that period.

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