Despite the challenges the music gaming industry has been facing of late–such as sales dropping, yipes, almost 50 percent in the U.S. this year–the top companies in the field are still churning out new products like it’s nobody’s business.

Case in point is a spate of new products from the Guitar Hero division of Activision Blizzard, which is coming out this fall with three separate major launches, starting tomorrow with the GH5 and including the hip-hop flavored DJ Hero in late October.

Here’s BoomTown’s sneak peek from GH’s HQ in Silicon Valley.

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From vacation, that is–an activity that I highly recommend (and getting toasted at Burning Man this week does not count, although that is also apparently highly recommended in order to endure that digital dustfest).

In any case, we begin Yahoo memo-bombing in five minutes.

That is all.

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Last week, in anticipation of Facebook’s Press Open House tonight for its spanking new HQ in Palo Alto, Calif., BoomTown hightailed it down there for an early look-see at what the social-networking site is doing with all that dough it collected from Microsoft and the Russians.

Moving into a new crib, for one thing!

I got an extra-special tour of the new 150,000-square-foot building, which brings more than 900 employees together at last, by Facebook’s long-suffering–mostly due to my being annoying, I know!–PR honcho, Brandee Barker.

So, much like the tour I did recently with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone of its San Francisco HQ, here is a video of Facebook’s new digs.

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While the current meme is that traditional journalism is getting the stuffing knocked out of it by the digital onslaught, it neglects to notice that a lot of really sharp news reporters are actually getting some real traction by finally starting to be serious about creating online sites that are designed to compete.

As case in point, BoomTown recently visited the offices of TheWrap.com, a Web blog aimed at dominating breaking news about the business of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

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Was it more than a month ago that the Google was rumored to be in “late-stage negotiations to acquire Twitter”?

Not so much late-stage, I guess. So, I guess it should come as no surprise that it was time to fob yet another rumor that yet another moneybags of a company–this time, Apple–is in “late-stage negotiations to buy Twitter.”

But despite very serious interest in the hot microblogging service by every company that can afford considering such a thing, including Apple, getting across that late-stage line would require major investors in the hot start-up to be very involved, and they are not as yet.

So, rather than be on the edge of your seat about all these endless, alleged late-stage high jinks, here is a five-step list to cut out and keep when the questionable rumors of “late-stage negotiations” with Microsoft, News Corp., Verizon, Cisco and more inevitably show up.

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BoomTown visited Twitter’s San Francisco HQ for a pie-filled tour yesterday, but I also got a chance to sit down and have a chat with two of its founders, CEO Evan Williams and Biz Stone, about all the latest doings at the wildly popular microblogging service.

I asked a lot before I did the video, but neither deigned to talk about the swirl of rumors about which giant Internet behemoth–Google or Microsoft–was going to get its wealthy mitts into the innards of Twitter (or not!).

Nonetheless, the pair actually took time to talk about what they think is behind the surge in growth and awareness of the simple-to-use service, as well as the state of innovation in Silicon Valley.

Here’s the video.

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Maybe you’ve heard of Twitter?

Fooled you! Just testing to see if you’re paying complete attention to the relentless media attention on the Silicon Valley start-up of the moment!

Well, BoomTown is too, and that’s why I fired up the MINI and motored top-down on over to Twitter’s San Francisco HQ yesterday to get myself a tour of the place by none other than co-founder No-Biz-Like-No-Biz Stone.

Here’s the video.

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If BoomTown had known on my recent visit that the New York Times was trying to borrow money, using its spanking new building as collateral, I might have brought a big bag of greenbacks with me just to say I held a mortgage on the stunning edifice. No matter, as I got a most excellent free tour of the Renzo Piano-designed building at 40th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan and lunch last week from the Times’s longtime and sharp tech reporter Saul Hansell, with whom I did a video interview about the state of the Web and more.

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It looks like Facebook will definitely be moving from its funky multi-building setup in downtown Palo Alto, Ca. to a centralized campus in Silicon Valley, said several sources.

The high-profile social networking company–which has been undergoing a major managerial shift of late as it matures from its startup status to that of a more established Web player–has been growing quickly to almost 600 employees today from a couple hundred last year.

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