I’m dismayed to see journalists continue to be punished, even fired, for expressing their opinions on the things they cover. Yesterday CNN terminated Octavia Nasr over a tweet praising a late Hezbollah leader. Last month Helen Thomas was forced to resign over statements about Israel. Last year the Washington Post put restraints on journalists from expressing opinions on social networks “that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.” The list goes on.

The number of visitors to MySpace UK has halved in the last six months, TechCrunch Europe has learned, leading to a fresh round of layoffs at the London office of the social networking site. According to internal figures that we’ve seen, monthly visits to MySpace UK are down from a peak of just under 10 million at the start of the year to around 5m as of the end of June 2010. If indeed this is the case – and we have every reason to believe the stats are authentic – it would appear to show a pretty staggering decline.

As soon as everyone got to actually see the unreleased Google Desktop application in action, they wanted to have it. The only problem is this isn’t just about waiting until Google finishes it off and ships it. There’s a real possibility that Google will never release a Skype-like soft phone for the desktop – they clearly want to build these types of applications in the browser.

E-commerce continues to provide a rich seam of businesses for European tech investors and this is represented today by a series A funding in an online retailer of ‘affordable’ designer fashion. My-wardrobe.com today announces a $9 million Series A investment round led by Balderton Capital, the first institutional investor in the company, supported by existing angel investors.

Twitter is pumping out reports that Wikipedia has been down worldwide for nearly an hour, and if you travel to wikipedia.org or another Wikimedia property, you’ll get confirmation in the form of a message saying, “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.”

Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web. Today, YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.

In an interesting pivot, YouTube’ advertising model is about to see a significant change toward more options for ad viewing. The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is beta testing a button that will let you stop a YouTube video ad from playing a few seconds after it begins. The site will eventually let you choose which ads you want to view when you’re about to watch a longer video, too, similar to Hulu’s current “tailored ad” experience.

Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.

A rather endearing video has been making the Internet rounds of late — a vid featuring the rap stylings of Cisco Systems intern Greg Justice, a.k.a. “The World’s Most Interesting Intern.” After seeing Justice’s rap on a few other blogs, we hit him up via Twitter to ask what the deal was. Apparently, the 21-year-old Stanford University student is currently working with Cisco’s Communications department to “harness social media to amplify Cisco’s awesomeness.”

Google has made it fairly clear that adoption of Google Apps at schools and colleges is vital to the growth of the productivity suite as a whole. The strategy makes sense; not only do educational institutions represent a huge market for Google Apps, but schools and colleges are where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to productivity apps. Today, Google is announcing that it has signed on two more states, Colorado and Iowa, to extend Google Apps for Education to the 3,000 schools across the two states.