• Google's still talking to YouTube about a buyout. One paragraph in the New York Times sums up the situation: "Barring a last-minute snag in the talks, the boards of both Google and YouTube were scheduled to hold separate board meetings on Monday to approve the deal, with an announcement possible after the close of regular trading. Discussions could still break down, however, or another party could present a more-attractive offer." [NY Times DealBook]

TechCrunch floats a rumor that Google's buying YouTube for $1.6 billion, calling it "40% likely to be at least partially true."

File it under "party rumors" for now, but I hear that Yahoo, fresh from buying video editing service Jumpcut last week, will pick up another company today.

While video giant YouTube stays indie, the mob of smaller video sharing services is selling out, one by one (Grouper to Sony, for example). Today, video mixing service Jumpcut announced that Yahoo bought it, celebrating with a cute video, remixable like all vids on the service.

The New York Post's tech writer (last seen stalking a Google founder's girlfriend) has Hard! Hitting! News! about YouTube:

Huckabuck has at least one thing in common with that ill-fated little online calendar Kiko. The New-Orleans-based "Web 2.0 search engine" is being auctioned off to the highest bidder over at Ebay. The site only makes a dollar a day through pay-per-click ads (making its promise to donate 10% of profits to Katrina victims underwhelming), so the current high bid of $9,100 probably won't rise to anything near the $250K that Kiko earned.

• Hewlett-Packard won't give George Keyworth a chance at re-election for the board next March, after the director leaked info to CNET, got investigated by chairwoman Patricia Dunn, and refused to resign despite his fellow directors' demands. Meanwhile, California's attorney general is investigating HP's investigation. Dunn, Keyworth, and former director Tom Perkins are exchanging barbs, each accusing another of violating their privacy. [Bloomberg]

"It's twice the flavor and half the calories," Rojo CEO Chris Alden said about Web 2.0 in August. Today must taste sweet for the boy who's sold his social feed reader to blogging company Six Apart.

Forget Sun + Apple. The next big deal will be eBay's inevitable merger with one of the two search giants. The net commerce company is already in bed with both Yahoo and Google.

[Update: Agh, we're two weeks behind with this news. Damn it, our staff sent this Internet to us and it just arrived...]

Now, if you were the Sales and Marketing VP of a tiny startup, and Sony was going to buy your little piece of flipmeat in a week, wouldn't you know about it?

Online video startup Grouper (pictured) denies any impending deal with Sony, despite an e-mailed rumor that one was buying the other.

We normally don't print acquisition announcements here (numbers are so boring), but the Wall Street Journal just confirmed a tip we got last hour: Viacom is about to buy Atom Entertainment, owner of game site Shockwave.com and video site AtomFilms.com (which currently displays the headline "New Boobs: Watch Now"), for about $200 million.

Hewlett-Packard will buy management software company Mercury Interactive, HP just announced. The hardware maker is thus entering the software biz and snapping up a big player in quality assurance.

Not that you care about one startup buying another, especially when it's already on that ubiquitous Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch, but RSS marketing network Feedburner bought blog analytic company Blogbeat. Blogbeat's homepage has a rundown of the deal. (We previously thought Feedburner bought Nooked, as posted here.)

PaidContent blogger Rafat Ali has more details on NBC's purchase of Tribe.net (broken by Valleywag last week). Ali says the social site sold for under $50 million — not quite the $500 million-plus that News Corp paid for third-generation social site MySpace last year.

Whoa, dude! Tribe, the social network preferred by Bay Area hippies and ravers, may be a damsel in distress as reported, says a tipster, but NBC is swooping down to whisk Tribe to its castle in the media sky.

Every now and then, a rumored deal actually sounds smart and strategic. Most of Yahoo's deals are like that: Yahoo's purchases of Upcoming.org, Del.icio.us, and Flickr make sense, and the only question is why the bought properties aren't already tied into the front page.

• Board-member-about-town Esther Dyson reminds you — personally — how much cooler her life is than yours. [EDyson on Flickr]

Buying the homely-looking food site Chowhound (she must be funny or something) wasn't enough for CNET. Continuing its chowdown (ha! ha! get used to it 'cause it's the only joke the tech zines will make tomorrow), the tech-news juggernaut announced a web version (still in the oven — ok, kill me) of its freshly acquired foodie magazine, Chow. Who knows if Chow will even have a print version this time — with the magazine already kaput, CNET was really just buying editors. From the internal memo: