1. Digg: Kevin Rose denies a Yahoo buyout, but commentators (like TWiT's Leo Laporte) say 'if he sells, he's buying dinner.'
2. Newsvine: The citizen-journalism-slash-real-journalism site hasn't even publicly launched, but it's already earning accolades from beta users. Already fresh, but still ripe, this would make a trendy purchase for Yahoo.
3. Tailrank: Kevin Burton's tiny aggregator could become a one-man merger -- but only if Kevin drops his dream of a user-funded startup.
4. Odeo: A natural acquisition. None of the portals have a good podcast play. And it's not taking off all by itself. Biz Stone just left Google to work at this startup; could he find himself back on campus?
5. Riya: The facial recognition software is a perfect technology to complement Flickr. On one round of funding, Riya has already developed smart recognition algorithms -- for example, it recognizes founder Tara Hunt. But one search giant already took a look at Riya and passed.
6. Six Apart: The blog platform developer is suffering downtime as it struggles to handle a growing user base. Would anyone buy a company that's a mishmash of publishing software, hosting services and a free community site? Or will Six Apart patch itself up and run solo?
7. Technorati: CEO Dave Sifry told the Red Herring two years ago to 'watch this space' for the blog tracker's exit strategy. This year, BusinessWeek predicts a flip to Microsoft. But in those two years, Technorati's piled on a lot of VC funding. Will its investors force it to take a lowball offer?
8. Napster: Not selling any time soon, and definitely not to Google. This sucker's losing money fast."
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