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.

DoubleClick and Postini lead a list of 19 acquisitions Google completed during its fiscal 2007, according to the company's annual 10-K filing. After the $3.1 billion it spent on DoubleClick and the $625 million for Postini, the rest of the deals cost Google $281.6 million. Want a piece next time the pie goes round? Here's the guy Google just put in charge of finding small fish in 2008.

It's a dilemma for Google: It spends very little on advertising, preferring to let its products speak for themselves (and leaving its marketing chief, David Lawee, without much of a job). And why not, since that's given it the world's most cost-effective brand. But that has left the company tone-deaf in speaking to Madison Avenue, since it hardly practices what it preaches. Finally, as I've advised for ages, Google has hired a brander-in-chief, Ogilvy & Mather's Andy Berndt.

Marcy Simon, left, the girlfriend of married Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is no longer a PR consultant at Google. So much for her reign as the Duchess of West Chelsea. The terms of separation are unclear: Simon has maintained to friends that she quit, while other insiders say Google executives Elliot Schrage and David Lawee fired her, with Schmidt stepping out of the matter. Schmidt's recusal may not be the only way in which he's staying out of Simon's affairs. Rumor is that Schmidt is now seeing Kate Bohner, right, a journalist and ex-wife of author Michael Lewis. No word on whether a Google gig is forthcoming for Bohner, though she does have a channel on the Google-owned YouTube.

David Lawee, the world's laziest marketer, builds the case for a firing with an unimpressive talk at Google's Japan headquarters. [From the Inside, Looking In]

I've been thinking, obsessively, about the revelation Google CEO Eric Schmidt made in last week's earnings call that his company had overhired. Even more curiously, Schmidt defended the hiring binge, expressing his delight in the quality of the people Google's overeager recruiters had brought on board.

David Lawee, Google's vice president of marketing, gets a slavishly unquestioning interview on BusinessWeek's website. Lawee stayed relentlessly on message, painting the usual rainbows-and-unicorns picture of life at the Googleplex. His PR handlers surely must have been pleased. As long as no one bothered, that is, to point out the obvious subtext: That Lawee's job has absolutely no point, and that he comes across as a complete tool. Ooops. I guess someone just did. Here are the lowlights of Lawee's interview, and why he wins our latest award for Silicon Valley Tool.