Click to viewDigg users should be glad merger talks with Google have cooled, writes Slate's Farhad Manjoo. Had Digg fallen into Marissa Mayer's frosting-laced clutches, the site would have probably become another startup lost in what Manjoo calls "the Google Black Hole." It happened to FeedBurner this week. And the RSS ad network, was just the latest, following Jaiku, JotSpot, Dodgeball, GrandCentral, and Measure Map. Their tales of doom in the Googleplex, below.

Another bizarre Google hiring story came through the grapevine. When Google bought Measure Map (scooped and reported here), it cut a special deal with the stat service's makers at Adaptive Path.

Right. Valleywag's been called "ValleyWag" too much to ignore. A quick guide to Valley capitalization, spacing, and punctuation:

"Esthr" Dyson's war on vowels expands past the pre-"r" "e". This time the victims are "accidnts" and "a warm welcm." Flickr is in pain, Esther. Make the hurting stop. [Flickr 1, Flickr 2]
"No two-tiered Internet," said Google. Unless, of course, it's Google's two-tiered Internet. Google and Earthlink partner up to offer free wi-fi with a faster pay version. [Newsvine]
Google loses an Image Search case to a porn company — for competing with the company's mobile business. Yes, some overworked schlubs are buying thumbnailed porn on mobile phones. A service that only the Valley could appreciate. [Financial Times]
Rambus gets sued again: The Los Altos chip patenter's business plan is thus: 1. Go to standards meetings. 2. Quietly patent everyone's standards. 3. Sue everyone who uses them. Then, Rambus investors form flame wars around any discussion of their dirty dealings. Finally, their lawyers have something else to do: Micron's suing them for all of the above. [Techdirt]
Now that Measuremap got bought, it's time for TechCrunch to promote another startup: Blogbeat. "Now with more cowbell," says the Web 2.0 company about its latest revision. Cute. That should attract the Yahoo acquisition team just fine. [TechCrunch]

You can't go a week without someone saying Google's buying you. And after so long, "no comment" won't cut it.

Told ya. If you haven't already seen Jeffrey Veen's post on the Google Blog, the Measure Map creator just left the UI consultants at Adaptive Path and sold his user-friendly stat-tracker to Google. (Of course, Valleywag readers knew it five days ago.)

Google and Yahoo buy up internet companies like Jerry Seinfeld collects Porsches. One would have thought that one of each model was quite enough, but the internet giants want a garage full of internet companies of every shape and color. So it is with site stats services such as MeasureMap.