Mike Arrington of TechCrunch is reporting that a rumour is circulating that Google may buy Youtube for around $1.6 billion.

“A quick phone call to a VC confirmed that the rumor is circulating (he also confirmed the price), but that is far from confirmation that this deal is happening. I’m digging for more but the source on this one is very good.”

His counter-intuitive point is that Google won’t be put off by the many irrate copyright holders whose rights have been breached by YouTube — they are now trying to strike deals with the owners.

Of course, Google would have to add the legal costs of these defences to the $1.6bn price of the property. Is that a good idea?

Arrington thinks it’s about 40pc likely. Time will tell.

Google’s Blogger.com, the original blog publishing platform for the world, has unveiled a new beta version that has enhanced privacy settings. You can now specify if a blog is public, private or by invitation only.

Steve Rubel comments : “I signed up for the Blogger beta and found the changes to be very intuitive although evolutionary from the last big upgrade. However, already there is a big hole for private blogs. By default Google turns on feeds for all new blogs. When these blogs are private, the feeds are still totally public and therefore can and will be indexed by search engines. Google should treat feeds on private blogs the same way they do in Google Calendar.”

TechCrunch notes : “… in my experience the beta system isn’t stable enough to use yet. You can check it out now though. Blogger users will be notified when they are invited to switch over to the beta version. … There is a long list of new and updated features, but in the long run I’m guessing that integration of Blogger with Google Accounts may make the biggest difference.”

Blogger was developed by Pyra Labs in 1999, and sold to Google in 2003. The company has rather sat on it ever since, making small changes here and there and allowing millions of spam “splogs” to build up on the system. It’s generally recognized though that Blogger is the simplest way to put up a free blog and learn to manipulate the template code.

As discussed here earlier this week, Google has announced a site where programmers can host their software projects.

The site: code.google.com/hosting is intended to further the open-source programming movement.

News.com reports: “Google’s hosting service, which accumulated dozens of new projects on its opening day, features mechanisms to store software, discuss it with mailing lists and track bugs. Google permits projects under a variety of open-source licenses–but not the full range.”

A Google spokesperson said: “We’d like to see projects standardize on the most popular, time-tested ones. The selected licenses offer diversity to meet most developer needs.”

Google’s service uses hosting software called Subversion. That start-up, which still oversees Subversion development and sells hosts distributed programming projects for its clients, welcomed Google’s move.

“I think it’s a great thing,” said CollabNet co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Brian Behlendorf, who added that Google still contributes to the Subversion project. “It’s not too often that Google can deploy something they didn’t entirely write.”

For those who track newly registered domains from Google, here’s an interesting snippet. In the past few weeks the company has registered a number of domains with even more now under the control of Google Inc. Lots of interesting names including several legal/law firm sounding names.

Read the list here.