In today’s edition of the New York Times, there was an article announcing that Google will offer “free downloads of music to anyone in China.”

Major record labels such as EMI and the Warner Music Group are partnering with Google to avoid piracy in China and eventually make profit from sharing advertising revenue with the search giant instead of selling their records.

Google’s approach to offer this service only and exclusively in China is to “build traffic and win new advertisers”, a risky but possibly very rewarding strategy. China has taken the place of the U.S as the biggest internet market in the world, so the potential is lucrative.

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Rumors have been bouncing around for months about a possible deal that would see Google gobble up Twitter. TechCrunch has just thrown more gas on the fire by passing a rumor that Google is, in fact, in late-stage negotiations for acquiring the microblogging platform.

According toe AllThingsD, though, that is purely false.

In fact, Twitter and Google have simply been engaged in “some product-related discussions,” according to one source, around real-time search and the search giant better crawling the microblogging service.

This seems much more likely, though I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a Google buyout either.

Web advertising spending reached over $23.4 billion in 2008, a 10.6 percent increase over 2007. The fourth quarter of 2008 was only 2.6 percent growth for $6.1 billion, which is still impressive considering the economic climate at the end of 2008.

Search advertising alone grew 20% and performance-based advertising a startling 57%.

Apparently, even though Google is shutting down its video ad unit, the market for video advertising grew three percent in 2008.

Read more at the Click Z.