Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Here’s the tastiest part of an article in the New York Times yesterday about how Goldman Sachs essentially borked a deal to offer its rich clients in the U.S. private Facebook shares:

“However, over the last two weeks, the companies’ [Goldman and Facebook] relationship has grown increasingly tense, people involved in the offering said. Accusations about the news leak have flown back and forth, these people said.”

You can say that again, but –as leaky as the social networking giant has been over these many years in Silicon Valley–it seemed obvious that most of the intricate financial details about the offering were hand-delivered right from some of Wall Street’s hired guns to the DealBook scribes at the Times.

(Memo to myself: Start kissing up to those bankers, however appalling!)

Unfortunately for Facebook, it was those massive news leaks that drew the attention of government regulators to the deal. And with worries that it veered too close to the edge of violating securities regulations, the U.S. part of the offering had to be pulled.

Despite this particular mess, this kind of mishegas is only going to increase now that the banker bloviating is getting fired up a notch in 2011, as a spate of Web 2.0 Internet companies moves to public offerings.

Along with Facebook, that includes Zynga, LinkedIn and Groupon, as well as several others, all of which are just starting the banker bake-offs that used to be common in the Web space.

And that’s going to mean plenty of information to be found as some of those bankers inevitably drop a dime on the companies they are hired by.

Translated into more modern social terminology that these companies better understand: Bankers are really good at oversharing.

How do I know this? Because that is exactly what happened when the Web 1.0 bubble was in full froth.

Like Christmas in July, as bankers arrived to compete to win IPOs, the information flow suddenly became huge for reporters like me–I was at The Wall Street Journal at the time–covering it all.

It looks like more of the same for this round of stock sales likely to come. Already we know more about Facebook’s financials than we ever did.

And to that, I say: Loose lips may sink ships, but it will make for an awesome amount of news to come in 2011 about the Internet’s starring players.

And it turns out that people still care about John, Paul, et al.

EMI says it has sold a staggering 10 million copies of the band’s remastered albums since September. The total includes the giant box sets of the band’s work (if you bought the stereo set, that accounted for 14 albums in one purchase; if you went with the mono discs, that counted for 11), as well as downloads for the sort-of successful Beatles Rock Band game.

And, of course, nada from iTunes. Sidebar: If and when the band finally starts selling its music on Apple’s (AAPL) digital storefront, will there be anyone left to buy it?

But back to EMI, which has much more unpleasant news to deal with, namely that owner Terra Firma seems to be at the end of its rope. The private equity firm is now suing Citibank (C), which lent it the billions it needed to buy the music company in 2007, for fraud.

And Terra Firma is reportedly looking for investors to lend it another $1.6 billion to keep the company afloat, in large part because it fears it will default on the money it has already borrowed from Citi.

The conventional wisdom, meanwhile, is that all of this is simply a precursor to an eventual combination between EMI and Warner Music Group (WMG)–a deal the two companies have been trying to pull off for close to a decade.

Terra Firma’s complaint, via the New York Times’s Dealbook, makes for fascinating reading, in large part because of the cognitive dissonance created by Terra Firma’s description of itself.

The company describes itself as a clueless investor duped by Citigroup into buying the music company in an auction with no other bidders and as a savvy manager that has turned around the ailing music company.

Can both descriptions be true?

Terra Firma’s Lawsuit Against Citi Over EMI

(Also, some free fact-checking for Terra Firma’s attorneys: The iTunes Store launched in 2003, not 2005.)

And for the last several years, the New York Times (NYT) has provided excellent on-the-ground coverage, usually via Dealbook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Not this year.

Reporters and media chieftains alike started arriving at the Idaho resort last night, but the Times is AWOL. If you want first-hand reportage on who said what outside the bar or by the duck pond, you’re going to have to rely on other news outlets.

Sorkin explained his absence via email to me:

For better or worse, I couldn’t make it out to Sun Valley this year because I’m chained to my desk for the next couple of weeks trying to finish my upcoming book, “Too Big to Fail.”

Given the market jitters–and resulting deal drought–we made the decision to cover the event from afar this year. I’m trying to stay up to date on the latest machinations out there by speaking with a half dozen of the invitees daily by phone and email–some of whom have already tapped out notes by Blackberry from inside this morning. (We actually might have a pretty interesting Sun Vally story up on DealBook in the next 24 hours.) We’re also running a series of Twitter feeds from other news organizations on DealBook’s homepage. And we plan to run several Sun Valley photo slide shows, as we’ve done in year’s past.

In truth, it’s debatable whether any news outlet has to be at Sun Valley: Some of the moguls use the opportunity to hold briefings with the press there. Google’s Eric Schmidt (GOOG) has been particularly talkative in years past. But anything truly important generally happens away from the scribes and usually comes to light well after the fact, so you could argue that real-time coverage is overrated.

On the other hand, last year Rupert Murdoch, who owns this Web site, enlisted the help of the press corps to help him find his wedding ring after an evening at the bar. That was a pretty great story.

And in any case, there are still plenty of other outlets on the ground. Among them: The Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times, CNBC, the New York Post, and our colleague Julia Angwin from The Wall Street Journal.

A quick perusal of Google News will keep you up to date, and if you want second-by-second stuff, there’s a Twitter stream, of course. And sure enough, Sorkin’s Dealbook has a nifty widget that lets you toggle between different Twitter feeds. It’s worth checking out.

Talks between the two companies continue. And, according to DealBook, which pegs the price at $9.50 a share, a deal could be announced as soon as Friday. If it is, it will likely prove the largest in IBM’s history, surpassing its $5 billion acquisition of software maker Cognos in November 2007.