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.

"Investing $5 million in a company that gets bought out for $25 million isn't going to get me into the VC Hall of Fame," Mayfield Fund VC Allen Morgan told Wired in 2006. "That's not why I got into this business." But that is why he's getting out of the business. Morgan was a champion of the Web 2.0 movement, suavely predicting that now-forgotten startups he funded like Pluck and JotSpot would soon go public in splashy IPOs. He bet that the spread of broadband would resuscitate business ideas which failed in the 1990s.

Google relaunched JotSpot, a group wiki it acquired in 2006, as Google Sites today. It's a collaborative wiki. Whatever. For a PR-friendly feature list, go check out Google PR. What we want to know is: What took so long? And why did Google bother?

Spoke too soon about JotSpot — two sources piped up to say that the wiki company built a software platform that could very well make the company worth the $50kM Google reportedly paid for it. One of those sources is a former JotSpot employee, the other is Netscape creator Marc Andreesen.

Word is that Google paid $50 million when it recently bought JotSpot (a deal that was arranged over a month ago but was only announced yesterday). Word also is that JotSpot's technology is a piece of crap — which its competitors gleefully acknowledge, though in more appropriate terms. So why did Google dump that much money?

• Behind the deal, volume V: How much did Wired pay for Reddit? One commenter: "If the alien waves, over 5 million." Another: "Tired: Asking how much Reddit was bought for. Wired: Buying Reddit yourself." [Reddit]

Google just bought JotSpot, a collaborative wiki creation site, for an undisclosed amount (if you know the price, e-mail tips@valleywag.com). JotSpot announced the buyout on the corporate blog, and CNet picked up the story.