Bloggers are gushing about Google's purchase of YouTube and mourning murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

GooTube, YouGoog, Tugle: On Monday, Google executives made public their purchase of pioneering video-sharing site YouTube, with the latter's young executives walking away with a cool $1.65 billion in stock options. YouTube, with a global audience of more than 50 million users, will retain its independence, but will get some much-needed assistance from Google's legal department.

Reception is mixed to YouTube's founders' smug video about the sale. Bob at VH1's Best Week Ever writhes with jealousy. "As we all sit at our desks this morning and wonder why WE didn't think of a website that allows people to share videos with one another, two twentysomething dudes from California are laughing all the way to the bank," he laments. In a post titled "YouTube Founders: New Money, Same Old Virginity," Gawker is disgusted. "If the the shit-eating grins and smug giggling weren't bad enough, [YouTube co-founder Chad] Hurley hits a whole new level of presumption as he explains, 'This is great. Two kings have gotten together...' King, eh?"

Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed also chimes in on the video: "Chad and Steven's frat-boy fuzziness somehow accomplishes the impossible: They make Google founders Larry and Sergey seem like buttoned-down refugees from GE's executive row. … [Y]ou can begin to see the cause of the non-existent founder-to-founder chemistry on today's Google/YouTube conference call."

Defamer, usually concerned with the comings and goings on the Hollywood set, shows its inner geek by hoping YouTube retains its flavor: "[W]e'd hate to have to visit a lesser video sharing site to view footage of P. Diddy basking in his ability to urinate in front of a television camera."

Social media expert Susan Mernit concentrates on what "Google mighta coulda bought with their money and didn't," and sees a paradigm shift. "[W]ith that kind of dough, Google could have bought the New York Times Company … But no--they didn't, did they--and the decision to spend all this money on YouTube shows that the coffin nails of mainstream media are already strewn across the open grave," she opines.

Others concentrate on what Google and YouTube will achieve with their powers combined. Jeff Pulver waxes poetic about the deal and what it means for new media. "I suspect that historians might come to recognize yesterday's announced acquisition of YouTube by Google, as one of the great indicators of the effects on the Internet on the historic transformation in the world of Media and Entertainment," he writes. Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine focuses on the merger's potential: "If the Google purchase of YouTube is successful, it will learn how to listen to people as individuals with taste and timely opinions and use that to enable us to find the video we each want to see wherever it is."

Read more about "GooTube."

Anna Politkovskaya, 1958-2006: Anna Politkovskaya, celebrated Russian journalist and an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead in an elevator in her Moscow apartment building last Saturday. A staunch opponent of the Kremlin's human rights abuses in Chechnya, she was the 13^th journalist to be killed since Putin took office in 2000. Politkovskaya was buried on Tuesday in a Moscow cemetery. Speaking at a conference in December 2005 in Vienna on press freedom, Politkovskaya said, "People sometimes pay with their lives for saying out loud what they think." She was to file on Monday a story on torture perpetuated by the regime of the Moscow-backed Chechen government.

"Was the truth she knew so bad that even muzzled and without an audience inside Russia she had to be removed?" a Moscow-based blogger asks at Ruminations on Russia.