Download Squad

I'm a big fan of the streaming music site Grooveshark. It's a great way to listen to practically any song and share new music with friends. EMI doesn't have any love for Grooveshark, though: the label is suing the service. It's not clear what the claims in the suit are, yet, but Grooveshark's side of the story is that they were negotiating some kind of licensing deal with the major labels, and EMI sued as a negotiating tactic.

I can see why a label would want to sue Grooveshark. According to one small label that's done business with them, Grooveshark just uses the labels' content to pay its bills, and offers little to nothing in advertising revenue in return. On the other hand, I don't know too many people who use Grooveshark as a replacement for buying a legitimate digital download of a song. You need to be online to listen, and you can't put streaming tracks on your iPod, so it hardly seems like an equivalent product.

I selfishly hope Grooveshark survives this lawsuit, because I enjoy being able to preview full tracks before I buy them. I also enjoy sharing music with my friends by embedding Grooveshark widgets or using the Facebook plugin, and maybe those friends will hear something they like and go buy an album. If I were the music industry right now, I might take those sales where I could get them.

[via AllThingsD]

Google's blogging service, Blogger is turning 10 in August. Google published a list of fun facts about Blogger today, including the fact that 2/3rds of Blogger's traffic comes from outside North America, the most popular sport for bloggers using the service is soccer, and at any given minute, 270,000 words are written on Blogger.

But while Google provides users with tools to publish Adsense ads on Blogspot sites (which can certainly help the company raise a fair bit of cash from all of those words), Google doesn't require users to post ads. And that means some users are basically using the service for free without generating any real revenue for Google.

Now Google Operating System reports that Google appears to be experimenting with another revenue generating opportunity. It's starting to place ads on the page that pops up when bloggers publish a post. These ads will never be seen by the readers of your blog, but there's a chance that some bloggers may click on contextual ads related to the articles they've been writing.

I tried writing a couple of test posts on several sites I've created using Blogger, but I didn't see any ads. If you use Blogger and have started noticing ads in the admin interface, let us know in the comments. It seems like a small price to pay for using a service that lets you host and update a blog for free. But I could certainly see it annoying some long-time users.

Bozeman, Montana -- a city just 5 miles to the east of freakin' nowhere -- as part of a more thorough set of background checks, is asking job applicants to, "list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc."

Federal law states that you can't ask about religion or marital status when interviewing you for a job, but both of those things are conveniently available in most Facebook profiles. Added to which, giving a prospective employer all your logins and passwords gives them access to direct and private messages, and in the case of most social networks, indirect access to the information of other people who never granted the city access. The whole thing violates just about every social network's Terms of Service, and just generally feels slimy.

In an interview with local news, the city's attorney says it isn't "trying to find out all kinds of information about the person that we're not able to use or shouldn't use in the hiring process."

Current job listings for Bozeman include a Water/Sewer technician so, presumably, with a high school diploma and a clean Facebook record, you could get hired to dig around in something that smells almost as bad as this hiring policy.

[via BoingBoing]

There are plenty of complex, feature-rich collaboration systems out there, but the web developers at Tgethr found that they weren't using all those extras. When it came down to it, all of their collaboration was happening over email, and Tgethr is just a way to make that email system work better. Start a new group with its own @tgethr.com email address, and Tgethr can encrypt and archive all the messages sent to that address online for easy reading.

The cool thing about Tgethr is that it's not really another service to use and commit to. You can respond quickly to the group by using your email client, and all the messages wind up in your inbox. Attachments get saved and linked, so you can download them from the web instead of having them sit in the individual inboxes of people in the group. If you're looking for a simple, sensible way to do email groups, Tgethr is a good bet.