According to a couple of sources, there are some very early patents (filed in 1996 and awarded three years later) on pay-per-click advertising that could spark a bidding war. The patents cover systems and methods for online advertising rather than the technology for it, and have been dormant for years after the filing company went under.

A week into news about AOL’s ginormous data dump and investigators have yet to tire of mining the minds of AOL users. As mirror sites spring up to face server overload as a product of morbid curiosity, the tales, well, inferences mostly, become darker and darker.

This weekend, the Valley lost a sharp journalist and a good man. Bill Goggins, a former editor at Wired Magazine, died while running the San Francisco Marathon this Sunday.

The game is over, and Friendster lost.

How do you follow an episode of tomato throwing and red paper clip up-trades? It’s a no-brainer: buffaloes and creepy music. Rocketboom’s second that’s-not-Amanda show left the audience in a pile of question marks.

The nation’s hottest video blog is back, and it’s snappy. Rocketboom interim host Joanne Colan (pictured here holding a symbol for triumph) displays the polish and ease that many viewers felt long-time host Amanda Congdon lacked.

When Cond Nast announced last night that it bought Wired News, the press acted like Wired was rescuing a desperate crew of disaster survivors.

In an apparent attempt to block access to child pornography, Ask.com has begun restricting results for certain search queries that may lead to offensive and criminal content.

Spend too much time in the world of superlinked social site users, and they start to look like the seedy pickup artists in last year’s book The Game.

Business 2.0 journalist/blogger Om Malik is reportedly quitting Business 2.0 and going solo.

Popular blogging site LiveJournal.com and parent company Six Apart have attracted the ire of breastfeeding bloggers after images of breastfeeding were banned from the site. After a letter campaign, “lactivist” mothers staged a “nurse-in” at the Six Apart San Francisco headquarters on Monday.

This past weekend, I did something that most normal people do. I met up with some people for a little soiree, then went out to some bars.

For your perusal this morning: Google’s China ad, a short Flash movie introducing the GuGe brand name.

A couple weeks ago, I went to the Silicon Valley PRSA blockbuster lunch and took notes. From these notes, I wrote a post for the FORWARD blog, the student-run Website and blog, for students.

Lots of rumors floating around about a Google music shindig tomorrow, and while Google has admitted it is taking place, they maintain that the private event is purely a networking event.

There have been a lot of official Google blogs and some not so official, yet they all tend to focus purely on the business-end of the company.

Valleywag is running “Valleywag Hotties“, a competition asking who the hottest man in geekdom is.

Could Google’s recent change to their position on manually changing search results be in light of Valleywag?

Google has picked up Measure Map, a very well reviewed web analytics site designed for blogs.

After Nick Denton enticed Nick Douglas away from Blogebrity, it was learned that Douglas would be the scribe behind the then-unnamed Silicon Valley outpost of Denton’s Gawker empire.

Gawker recently launched ValleyWag, a gossip blog for the Silicon Valley area.