As has been copiously reported here and all over, Yahoo and AOL have been engaged in never-ending talks about a possible deal to merge their flagging Internet businesses.

Now, sources tell me, the circle of executives at both companies interfacing with each other has been widened, for purposes of due diligence.

That includes Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, who is in New York this week–where AOL parent, Time Warner, is located–to meet once again with its CEO, Jeff Bewkes, to see if they can actually complete the merger.

Now, all this frantic activity does not mean a deal will necessarily be struck.

But it is just this kind of ramped-up blabbery that has many at both companies predicting that a deal will go through, sooner or later, as soon as Time Warner and Yahoo can agree on a price.

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Back in the first season of “Saturday Night Live,” one running catchphrase uttered by Chevy Chase would always crack the then-12-year-old BoomTown right up: “This breaking news just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

It’s that same kind of extreme déjà vu I feel with the continuing drip-drip-drip of the news-less news that Time Warner’s AOL and Yahoo are still talking about a merger.

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Earlier today, BoomTown broke the stunning-for-blogs news that ContentNext, owner of the popular online digital media news site paidContent, was being bought by the Guardian Media Group for about $30 million in an earn-out acquisition.

But the deal–which comes after the mid-May sale of Ars Technica to Condé Nast for a reported $25 million–begs the question of which tech blog might be next to be acquired.

And, after much noisy poking around today, BoomTown is giving the nod to one of the sector’s larger and splashier sites: TechCrunch.

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With thanks to engadget, we repost this portrait of our beloved leader at AllThingsD.com, Comrade Walt Mossberg.
Walt has long railed on the topic of the stifling of innovation by the U.S. cellphone carriers–especially to me over dinner when I am really tired–so it is nice to see it in a terrific piece you should not [...]

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However we missed a week of posting the GigaOm Show on Revision3 escapes us–it had something to do with tequila and Britney Spears, but we are foggy on the exact details.
Nonetheless, here are two for the price of one (and, by price, we mean free) for your techie enjoyment.
Last month, Om Malik and his co-host, [...]

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Is there no end to my groveling?
Apparently not, if it has the effect yesterday’s round of begging had by more than doubling our donor numbers and adding more than $1,500 to the AllThingsD kitty in only one day, after this post in which I egregiously use the musical stylings of Barbra Streisand to plague Yahoo [...]

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The ever helpful Jim Louderback–now of Revision3, who works with Om Malik at his GigaOM show on that video site–comes through with an embeddable show.
And I only had to ask nice once after I complained in a post here that the online video show was not viral. Horrors!
Malik hosts the interview show weekly with lawyer [...]

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That old charmer Om Malik lured me onto his online GigaOM Show on Revision3, where he and co-host Joyce Kim interviewed me for its seventh episode about a range of topics.
They included getting me to talk about what I really think of new owner Dow Jones owner Rupert Murdoch (quick summary: He’s certainly been a [...]

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While we were visiting at Mahalo, we ran right into Ryan Block, the majordomo of Engadget–the geek-lovers’ Web site that was once part of Jason Calacanis’s Weblogs empire. It is now owned by AOL, which forked over a large bag of cash, mostly due to the popularity of Engadget, to buy the company.

Block was [...]

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The big question for me is: What will all the iPhonatics do after the much-hyped iPhone from Apple debuts this Friday to continue to feed their state of expectant euphoria?
iPhone 2.0!
But until then, we might as well wallow in it.

So here is a funny report from Engadget about the imagined possibilities for the next cheaper [...]

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