• Barely anyone watches TV or movies online, but everyone has 30 seconds to see a guy kicked in the nuts, finds a new AP/AOL Video poll. [AP on Yahoo News]

Is it just me (and the finder) amused by this shot from Microsoft's developer network?

Every week brings a new merger rumor, and just like celebrity couples (Bennifer! TomKat! Vive la diff rance!), every merger needs its portmanteau. So remember the official merger names:

It's time again to check up on how the big dogs relate to each other. While blogger Om Malik chooses to say it with words, we chose fingerpaints. That was a disaster, so we made this graph.

• Web calendar startup Kiko sold for over $250k, which blogger Om Malik says is a great deal for a company that only took $50k in "convertible debt" (an angel investment somewhere between a loan and buying a share of the company outright). [GigaOM]

The Wall Street Journal reports that the deservedly popular Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant Microsoft training videos (covered here earlier) are no longer on YouTube, which yanked them at Microsoft's request. While the company does its damnedest to hide from the world the one shred of evidence that it has a sense of humor, you can still see the vids at Google Video here and here.

• This week, the TechCrunch blog lost its French translator, who says he was working for free. One fellow blogger thinks Marshall Kirkpatrick may be TechCrunch's only paid writer, but I know CrunchGear editor John Biggs definitely isn't working for free. [Guillaumeb.com]

• Sony bought video site Grouper (pictured) for $65 million; analysts say it's for the technology, not for the traffic. [NYT]

Microsoft, in a move bound to inspire every geek forum in the world to make "It's a trap!" jokes, invited the makers of Internet Explorer alternative Firefox to MS HQ.

David Brent, the "Office" boss played by Ricky Gervais, needs no intro. So here he is, in a special training video for Microsoft. (Thank God they didn't pick Steve Carell.)

Microsoft hit another deadline snag, this time for its 3-year headquarter construction in Redmond datacenter in central Washington. A reader says:

An unknown advertiser is running a viral at Notfornoobs.com, using a TV that flashes the logos for Razer computer peripherals and Microsoft. (We assume that anything with an unauthorized MS logo would be shut down before you can say "crack legal team," so the company's partly guilty for this ad.)

Over the weekend, while you shivered in the wind at the beach, life went on for the tech world:

Today, a product team manager left Microsoft's Windows Live division to start his own company. That manager was Niall Kennedy, who had only joined Microsoft in April after leaving Technorati. I chatted with him about his move.

• Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is taking a trip to the South Pole. In a hydrogen-powered Hummer. With Buzz Aldrin in the driver's seat. And James Cameron filming it — in 3d. [Barrons]

Supersize the pizza delivery and console the Mini-Microsoft blogger — the Redmond software giant added 10,000 jobs this year. Presumably, about 500 went to making sure Vista gets delayed on time, while a couple thousand were put on the Zune marketing team.

The Force of a Thousand Pizzas that swept onto the Googleplex raises the question: how much pizza would it take to peacefully invade Microsoft? YouTube? The nation of Iraq? Wonder no longer: we solved it! With science!

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a hard time convincing the media that the company will do well without Bill Gates in charge. The pressure must've gotten to him, because he just compared his boss to the father of Chinese communism. Ballmer told the Wall Street Journal:

• Google launches a tool to show advertisers when they're getting screwed by clickfraud. Will it give the same dire results that this independent tool gives? [BusinessWeek]