Yahoo and Microsoft are poised to finally sign the definitive agreement that will govern the complex and far-reaching search and online advertising partnership they struck in late July, said sources close to the situation.

If all goes well, the various Microsoft and Yahoo execs–who have been ferreted away over the last weeks, busy dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s in the massive document–could even turn in the delayed deal homework to their bosses for signature by the end of the week.

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In what should come as a shock to almost no one, the detailed negotiations to complete the Microsoft and Yahoo search and online advertising final agreement are more complicated than its authors anticipated and are taking longer than expected to complete.

Relax, folks–they’ll get done.

But here’s a more important thing that should wrap up sooner than later: Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s gibes about former CEO and co-founder Jerry Yang’s tenure.

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Yahoo reported its third-quarter earnings earlier today, a pretty good performance in which it soundly beat Wall Street expectations with a stronger net income than expected.

While advertising revenue was down at the Silicon Valley Internet giant, also as expected, cost-cutting by CEO Carol Bartz and the sale of its stake in China’s Alibaba seem to have more than made up for it.

Here are Yahoo’s financial presentations, full of more numbers than you will ever want to crunch.

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Yesterday, BoomTown checked in with Docstoc CEO Jason Nazar about the document sharing start-up.

Today, it’s Trip Adler, CEO of its much larger rival, Scribd.

Launched in early 2007, the San Francisco-based online publishing company allows customers to share a wider range of documents, including books and manuscripts. It now claims to have 10 million documents.

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On a recent visit to Los Angeles, BoomTown stopped in at the Santa Monica HQ of Docstoc, a start-up aimed at document-sharing online.

I have long been interested in the next paradigm for all sorts of publishing.

And Docstoc is certainly among the more innovative sites, letting users store, search and share business, legal and tech-related documents for free.

Here’s a video tour of the start-up.

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From vacation, that is–an activity that I highly recommend (and getting toasted at Burning Man this week does not count, although that is also apparently highly recommended in order to endure that digital dustfest).

In any case, we begin Yahoo memo-bombing in five minutes.

That is all.

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Finally, the kind of response this whole increasingly silly circus around TechCrunch publishing the Twitter stolen documents deserves.

Funny, rude and pretty much the only good way to excuse it all, via expletives deleted, courtesy of 1938 Media.

Now, BoomTown can go back to real issues, such as obsessing about when the Yahoo deal with Microsoft will drop, if ever!

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For all the noisy hubbub over should-we-or-shouldn’t-we-publish confidential documents hacked from password-protected accounts of Twitter employees, as well as a Twitter spouse, it is actually pretty simple.

Stolen equals stolen.

But, because this is a “hot” issue and it concerns an even hotter Web 2.0 company–Holy traffic-gooser, Batman!–the debate will surely go on and on, even as the stolen information inevitably leaks its way out.

Still, let’s not pretend what it is and is not.

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One thing that’s nice in these volatile times is that the Winklevoss identical twins–aka the Olympic rowing hunks whom Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to have repeatedly dunked since college–can always be relied upon to create nonstop entertainment for those riveted to their increasingly kooky lawsuit against the hot social-networking site.

In any case, it’s only the legal hijinks–either via rank incompetency or, more likely, creative leaking–that I want to know more about, especially since release of heretofore confidential information seems to keep seeping out of this case like some hole-plagued rowing shell.

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