As Melly Alazraki mentioned in her post last night, everyone is mourning, alas poor Yahoo!: the real loser in the Google-YouTube deal. And the best defense is a good offense, right? So naturally the lips of investment bankers are wet with the licking. I can just see (in my imagination silly! I don't have spies) the acquisition pitchbooks being pitched left and right all over Terry Semel's desk.

Is Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) buying? And if the company is keeping its fax machines busy with term sheets, who might it buy?

Yahoo!'s never been afraid of a good little acquisition. Hello, Flickr, hello, Facebook.com? Interested parties have mentioned names like Dabble (a sort of online TV Guide, and no, I never heard of it either), Heavy.com (whose co-CEO says that, although he's not selling, he'd of course consider a deal with "a good exit strategy," haha) and our own Tom Taulli's favorite, vMix, whose CEO spoke not a word of acquisition talk in his interview with us.

But Melly makes an excellent point: shouldn't Yahoo! finish Project Panama first? How the heck could the company even monetize an acquisition right now? Maybe eBay should be the one out there buying. Yeah!

I can just hear the investment bankers scurrying back to their PowerPoint files now and doing replace-all for "synergies with" from "Flickr" to "Skype" ...

People power is driving real growth on the Web, according to a recent report from Nielsen//NetRatings. That is, five out of the ten fastest growing Web brands rely primarily on user-generated content – which is an amalgam of things like videos, pictures, and blog posts.

There are the usual suspects. Yea, MySpace is on the list, which had an 183% year-over-year surge in growth (in terms of unique visitors). Actually, this is an amazing feat, given the fact the site already had a huge base. Hmmm....maybe Google's decision to plunk down $900 million was a good thing.

Another barn-burner was Wikipedia. It clocked a 181% annual explosion in unique visitors. Yahoo's Flickr was a standout, with 201% annual growth (the site now has 6.3 million unique visitors).

There are also some not-so-well known companies, like ImageShack (233% growth) and Heavy.com (213%).

Hey, but it's not just scrappy and cool Web 2.0 firms that are benefiting from this trend.