Just when you thought Twitter was a dead duck, a flurry of news suggests there’s life in the old bird yet!

Facebook is “one hundred percent” buying Plaxo, we’ve just heard from a source.

Wow, starting your story with that sentence certainly grabs your attention, doesn’t it? VentureBeat’s managed to make a statement of "fact" without actually saying that it has confirmed the story. Nice!

$300 million could be the magic number that sends Digg to new ownership, as bloggers speculate on who might end up the new top Digger.

When a company’s reputation comes under attack, it can be tempting to bring in the company attorney and fire off a "cease and desist" letter. Unless you’re responding to something that is clearly libelous, trying to cover up your mess by threatening the messenger usually backfires–in a big way.

Third part application developers on Facebook’s platform have been the target of Google recruiting efforts to embed AdSense within their creations.

I remain wary of itty-bitty screens, but another social network designed for the mobile market is reportedly ready to emerge.  This one’s name is Trutap.

They’ve been railing against peer-to-peer for some time now, and more recently have put the squeeze on webcasters via royalty hikes, but it looks like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has added a new foe to its ever-expanding list: social networkers.

Dare Obasanjo asks “what are those A-list technology bloggers good for?”

He’s absolutely right! (I’ve been saying that a lot today — I’m in a very agreeable mood).

Targeted content has grown in importance to advertisers, with content-specific “synthetic channels” offering better returns through the more effective placement of their advertisements.

Imagine if Google paid $1 for every search you performed – pretty cool, right?  Now, Sharogle couldn’t afford nearly that rate, but it was, by all accounts, “a search engine that shares its revenue with users.”  Emphasis on “was” – Google pulled its ads from the site, and Sharogle now faces an uncertain future.

In a manner of speaking, Healthline is looking especially robust today – it just received $21 million in financing.  And if, like me, you often aren’t acquainted with the names of financial backers, you should still recognize the entity that was behind this gift: GE/NBC Universal’s Peacock Equity Fund.

How would you like to get paid to just sit around and give some thought to what start-up you’d like to do next? Sounds good to me, and it must have sounded pretty enticing to Bret Taylor and Jim Norris, two of the engineers behind Google Maps, as they’ve left Google to join venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.

Xing and ZoomInfo have just partnered, leaving LinkedIn out in the cold.  But that’s okay, says LinkedIn’s CEO – he doesn’t really approve of those two, anyway.

Xing, ZoomInfo Partner

It has long been a dream of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s that he not have to see advertising for certain products of a feminine nature while watching a football game. Google may be closer to being a player in the TV advertising market through a rumored deal with Dish Networks.

Yahoo China is preparing to file an aggressive new lawsuit against Qihoo, a rival portal. The case will reportedly target Qihoo’s founder (and former president of Yahoo China), Zhou Hongyi, by claiming “that Zhou has embezzled from Yahoo China and defrauded it.”