This weekend on Twitter, someone paid BoomTown a compliment of a sort: “I read you because you are a solid fact-based reporter with a Miss Cleo intuition ”

Yipes, because of being fact-based and since I had brought her up in an originating tweet, I had to point out that the well-known-via-infomercials Psychic Friends Network shaman turned out to be a bit of a fraud, although she’s always entertaining, with her jaunty Jamaican accent (she was not, of course, from there).

Nonetheless, it got me thinking about how I would predict what would result from all the deal-making that is suddenly in the air, after six months of ennui from the current economic downturn.

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Internet navigation browser plug-in maker Cooliris, which lets users “see” the Web in a more visual manner, has gotten $15.5 million in additional funding from its investors.

The new round includes Kleiner Perkins, DAG Ventures, the Westly Group and T-Mobile’s T-Ventures, bringing its total funding to $18.5 million.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up is also releasing out of beta the latest upgrade to its 3-D “Wall” software, which displays more online content and information from around the Web, including from social-networking services like Facebook, shopping sites and from a user’s own hard drive.

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Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip digital video cameras, has sold itself to Cisco (CSCO) for $590 million in stock.

The deal, which had been rumored last week, was announced this morning by Cisco.

The simplicity of Pure Digital’s line of relatively inexpensive cameras has made it a huge consumer success, which is no easy task in the devices arena.

And Cisco has been trying to turbocharge its consumer-focused business and the move is a clear step in that direction.

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Nobody, but nobody, releases news late Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, unless they are trying to do a PR pirate raid on another company.

So it was nice to see Facebook, which tried and failed to buy Twitter, having the moxie to release impressive user numbers for the fast-growing social-networking site just as all the oxygen was getting sucked out of the media room by news that the microblogging start-up got $35 million in new funding and a $250 million valuation.

Translation from Facebook founder and CEO Mark “Talk-Like-a-Pirate” Zuckerberg: Aarrr! Yer a scurvy bilge rat, puny Twitter!

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Here’s the official press release from the popular news and blogging site, The Huffington Post, which announced $25 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners this morning.

Sources told BoomTown the investment gives the site, which had 4.5 million unique visitors in September, a quadrupling from a year ago, a valuation of “south of $100 million.”

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The Huffington Post, co-founded by Arianna Huffington, will announce this morning that it has raised $25 million, in a single investment from Oak Investment Partners.

The large round, which was led by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capitalist Fred Harman, will give the popular online news and blogging site a valuation of “just south of $100 million,” a source said.

The new funding, the Huffington Post’s third, will be used for expansion of its offerings and the hiring of editorial and business talent.

“I think the post-election perception of the Huffington Post has changed in the eyes of advertisers to being a key mainstream news site,” said Harman in an interview with BoomTown last night.

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Last night, I was the master of ceremonies, as I have been for several years, at the laudable annual Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture firms that support women-led companies.

And VC Tim Draper really went above and beyond in showing–quite literally–his support.

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Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta will take the CEO job at a music discovery site called Playlist, a move that had been speculated last week, after he did not end up taking another position as head of MySpace Music.

Van Natta’s arrival at Playlist was not the only news for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up–former AOL exec Bob Pittman’s Pilot Investment Group is also investing an undisclosed amount of money in Playlist, and Pittman will join its board.

The site, which has been called Project Playlist, had previously raised several million dollars. The new round of funding super-sized that, sources said, hovering at about $18 million.

“Discovery around music is exploding on the Internet,” said Van Natta to BoomTown, in an interview this afternoon, giving it as his main reason for joining Playlist.

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Widget maker RockYou announced today that it has nabbed a $17 million investment from two Asian firms, SoftBank Group and SK Telecom Ventures.

The investment will be added to $35 million from the Redwood City, Calif.-based start-up’s C round in June. Overall, RockYou has raised a total of $67 million and–before the current econalypse–had previously reported a $400 million valuation.

In a video with BoomTown, the company’s co-founders, CEO Lance Tokuda and CTO Jia Shen, said the new funding would be used to expand into the Asia-Pacific market, add offices and staff and make acquisitions.

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BoomTown has officially selected The Mechanical Zoo–a super-secret-shhh-onthedownlow start-up that already got tons of attention due to its passel of ex-Googlers and its mashup plan to mix social and search–as its next candidate for excessive Web 2.0 funding.

And, according to several sources, the San Francisco-based company is working on closing a mega-Series-A round right now, with all the usual big VC suspects in the running.

The Mechanical Zoo has already raised $750,000 in seed funding from angel investors and has access to other funding from institutional investors.

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In a much-expected financing, LinkedIn has joined the big funding club (Slide, Spot Runner) of late, by raising $53 million at a startling $1 billion valuation.

Why go public when you can just pretend?

Actually, unlike a lot of Web 2.0 start-ups, the professional-networking site has been profitable since 2006.

The new slug of cash comes from new investor Bain Capital Ventures, along with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Ventures.

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While Wetpaint’s $25 million new round of funding was leaked to one and all under embargo until 12:01 am EST today–including BoomTown, so don’t assume any of us report our little hearts out on all these bits of news–what the press release did not disclose, sources said, was an intriguing new investor: Fidelity Investments.

What’s interesting about this wrinkle is that it is yet another validation in Web 2.0 world from a large traditional institutional investor.

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RockYou, widget maker, is the latest example of a sane valuation heartbreaker, as it is undertaking efforts to secure an investment from mainstream financing firms that would value the company at between $300 million and $400 million.

First reported by Valleywag last night, the start-up, said one source, “is being squired around Wall Street” by investment behemoth Morgan Stanley, in search of the same kind of deal its rival Slide got in January.

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It’s Bubble Time!
As BoomTown broke the news in its post earlier today, Slide grabbed a big pile of cash from new investors–$50 million from Fidelity and T. Rowe Price–which puts the value of the company at $550 million.
In our post, we said the San Francisco start-up, whose widgets are among the most popular on Facebook [...]

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Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.
It’s an open secret in Silicon Valley that search giant Google grabbed YouTube from Yahoo at the last minute in a deal-making frenzy.
I didn’t mean in my last update posted earlier today to leave out that possibility happening again with regard to Facebook’s current round of funding [...]

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