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Fresh from Warner Music's bruising YouTube fight comes word that the four major music labels—Warner, Universal, Sony, and EMI—may collaborate to create their own YouTube killer.

Ever since Warner Music's videos were pulled from YouTube over the weekend, analysts and reporters have been scrambling to figure out what went wrong. At first, you might think that this is the latest example of a swaggering Google pissing off content providers and walking all over copyright law, a la Viacom. But you'd be dead wrong.

Wow, times must be hard at the GooglePlex. Most years, Google hotshots can look forward to holiday cash bonuses of up to $20,000 apiece. This year, Valleywag reports, the company has decided to give everyone ... one of their new Android phones, which retail for $180. You might say that's something of a comedown.

Will YouTube ever be worth the $1.6 billion Google paid for it? It's easily the most-watched video site in the world, but translating ubiquity into money has been a lot harder than anyone thought. Advertisers, it turns out, don't want to place ads next to grainy films of your cat throwing up a hairball.

One of Google's enduring quirks is the company's stubborn insistence on keeping products in "beta," or test, mode for years while its engineers tweak them over and over; Gmail, for example, is still in beta, believe it or not. So when Google announced yesterday that its new browser Chrome had come out of beta, after just months of test runs with the public, you could tell it considers the browser key to its fight with Microsoft.

As part of its promise to archive all the world's information, Google has tried to scan every book in the major university libraries of America, map the earth, and slowly archive every photograph Life magazine ever took. Now, the search company has added magazines to its universe of perpetual information.

Yesterday, Google took another big step toward trying to dominate the mobile Internet search ad market when it announced that from now on, its AdWords service would be available on both the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1 phone.

Your shameless speculation of the week comes courtesy of Forbes Magazine, which picked up on some strange rumblings coming out of the GooglePlex. The Internet research firm Net Applications has refined its Web analytics service so keenly that it can now break down and analyze Web traffic by company, recording the Internet browser, the IP address, and other features.

Looks like everyone's agog over the news that the Department of Justice was three hours away from suing Google and Yahoo before the Mountain View search giant killed the deal last month, but we can't figure out why.

The Wall Street Journal dedicated today's front page to Google's dwindling fortunes, and how the company has reacted to the broader economic meltdown. It's a study in how Silicon Valley firms slide from the glorious start-up days into the middling reality of running a company that doesn't know how to mint money anymore, and no one has been more glorious than Google.

As part of its marketing strategy, as well as an effort to create more constructive online communities, Google is organizing a concert at Carnegie Hall, in which the symphony consists entirely of musicians who auditioned on YouTube.