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Google’s mission, to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible, has once again run afoul of the Chinese government, which has a similar goal, but would much prefer that certain information stay inaccessible. And so, on Wednesday evening, Chinese citizens found themselves once again unable to use Google, Gmail, and YouTube as their government condemned Google as a purveyor of porn.

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YouTube may be losing money, but it’s not losing nearly as much as some claim. Certainly not the $470 million that Credit Suisse projected in April, citing massive infrastructure costs. According to IT research outfit RampRate, a more realistic assessment of YouTube’s operating loss for 2009 is $174 million, nearly $300 million less than Credit Suisse’s estimate.

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If China wants to correct the “false impression” that it fears the Internet, ending its repressive and paranoid blocking of Web services would be a good place to start. This morning Beijing extended the Great Firewall of China, restricting Internet access to Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail and Bing, among others.

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Yahoo announced some updates to its homepages today–mobile and Web both. Designed to make them more personally relevant to their users, the pages are more customizable than they’ve been before. The release in full, after the jump.

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If the Web has a single point of failure, you’d think it was Google, given the outcry over the the outages suffered by some of the company’s services Thursday. Something went wrong at the company this morning and whatever it was had widespread effects on a broad spectrum of Google services. The source of the disruption? A system error that sent a bunch of Google Web traffic to Asia, apparently.

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It was like a liveblogging tournament this past week–one that included a lot of the big players, but ended in a three-way tie.

According to BoomTown’s reliable sources, the elusive Microsoft-Yahoo deal is making “meaningful” progress. Accordingly, BoomTown also wondered whether Ballmer planned on visiting Carol Bartz on his trip to the Bay Area this week, or if the proximity of Stanford to Yahoo was just chance, given that Stanford was his main destination.

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In advance of its shareholder meeting today, Google is holding a press event at its Mountain View, Calif., campus with CEO Eric Schmidt presiding. Also on hand: Dave Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development; Susan Wojcicki, vice president for product management, and Marissa Mayer, vice president, search products and user experience. Hot topics of the day: Google’s and Apple’s interlocking boards, YouTube and the company’s thoughts on the econalypse, AOL and netbooks.

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Took ’em long enough. After weeks of rumor and speculation, Walt Disney Co. has finally taken a stake in Hulu, the video-streaming site operated by NBC Universal, News Corporation and Providence Equity Partners. Financial terms and the structure of the deal weren’t disclosed, but sources say Disney’s stake in the venture will be 27 percent.

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In a move that most likely would not have been made without the recent efforts of Ashton Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his candidacy for the California Governor’s seat this morning via Twitter.

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A look back at the week during which approximately 40 percent of the posts were about Twitter. Or at least it seemed that way.

BoomTown got the ball rolling by making a visit to Twitter HQ bearing pies. During a video tour of the premises, Biz Stone discussed rock stars and booze, and spilled the secret of the strange green deer.

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Welcome back to Weekend Update, where we showcase some of the highlights from this site over the past week. In the umpteenth round of the old versus new media match, the Associated Press in its annual meeting this week played into the stereotype of the grizzled no-nonsense editor who shakes his fist at the new interweb thing (or was it intertube?) and its feisty friend, Google News, who are running amok on his lawn.

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