• A too-early report threw everybody off. Let’s face it. The legendary basketball coach, 99 and in grave health, probably isn’t going to be long for this world. But he isn’t dead let. However, Twitter seems to have jumped the gun on his fate. If it makes you guys feel better, this memorial photo gallery on the Washington Post’s site hit Google News early under the headline “John Wooden Dies at 99.” Oh boy. That isn’t good, guys. source

• 2005 In Aruba, Natalee Holloway went missing and is presumed dead. Dutch student Joran van der Sloot is a suspect, but evidence against him is weak.
• 2008 After the case dragged on and on (and on – thanks Nancy Grace), prosecutors try and fail to re-arrest van der Sloot after new evidence surfaces.
• 2010 In Peru, van der Sloot is the main suspect in the murder of Stephany Flores Ramirez, and this time, there’s sufficient evidence. She was found in his hotel room. source

• NO he divorced in 2008; that’s
  what his lawyer says source

• » Why this matters: Two words: Terri Schiavo. Remember the long fight over keeping that woman alive? Well, if Shannon Price and Coleman weren’t married, it’s possible that she didn’t have the right to order to pull the plug on Coleman’s life support.

• 30% raise to help limit workers’ suicidal thoughts source

• A very harrowing clip to watch. Israel just stepped in it, big time. For the last three years, Israel has been enforcing a blockade on the Hamas-led Gaza Strip. When a series of ships from Turkey full of activists and supplies tried to get past the blockade, the situation got incredibly violent, with at least ten deaths. Now Israel has completely pissed off their only Muslim ally in the Middle East, along with much of the rest of the world. source

• 90+ were killed in the season’s
  first tropical storm
• 73+ were killed in landside-ridden Guatemala alone source

• It was the first truly social music service. While Lala took a little while to get its footing, when it finally did, it was nothing short of magical. With Apple’s purchase of the service back in December, we knew this day was coming, but May 31st will still be a sad day for a lot of music fans like us. Here are some reasons we’ll miss Lala but will remain hopeful about its future as part of iTunes.

A quick history of Lala

• 2006 Lala launches as an easy way to trade CDs, similar to Netflix in some ways.
• 2007 Lala adds a free, on-demand way of listening to music. It doesn’t work at all.
• 2008 The company finally nails its most popular form, a 10¢ cloud music model.
• 2009 The company runs out of cash and sells itself to Apple for around $20 million.
• 2010 Apple shuts down the site, possibly to launch a similar iTunes version. NO! *sob*

What Lala had that nobody else did

• Simple, cheap options With songs available for a mere ten cents a piece and completely free to listen to once, it created a low barrier of entry that encouraged new listening habits.
• Easy sharing You could put a Lala embed on your site and share music with other people, legally and free; a number of sites took advantage of this model, from the AV Club to Pitchfork.
• Cloud-based freedom You could put your entire library on the site and listen anywhere. Sadly, Lala never got a chance to do what would’ve really made it a big hit – put it on the iPhone.

Why Lala got away with it

• We said, ‘consumers shouldn’t have to worry about where their files are, they should be able to play their music.’ It’s actually a huge benefit for the labels, because once Lala knows the music that you listen to, it makes perfect sense to say, ‘hey, Wilco has a new album coming out.’
• Lala CEO Bill Nguyen • About the benefits of the cloud music service to record companies. They were able to sell the model to them on the idea that they could provide information that might encourage future purchases. One thing that Nguyen noted is that when people were billed by the service, they bought one out of every five songs, most of which they found through discovery. On Lala, people weren’t simply listening to their collections. They were trying to find new songs. The model worked for eMusic already, but they broadened it.  source

So, what’s next, anyway?

• Well, it could be the next iTunes. Or not. With the service’s recent acquisition by Apple, it’s entirely possible that they’ll take this model and completely make it theirs. Or they might ditch certain parts of it and focus exclusively on the cloud service. Lala was out of money by the end, so they couldn’t see the idea through. But Apple, as you might know, has a ton of money and clout to pull this idea off. Or they could stick with their walled garden approach. We’ll see.

Let’s remember how great it was, guys.

• Post on Twitter about how much you’ll miss the little music locker that could, and we’ll reflect it here. Might as well, right? The tags #riplala or “lala.com” will work just fine. source

• Of all the bad hands people have been dealt in life, of the people who I have known up close, compared to the starving in Mongolia, Gary had as about a rotten combination as anything I’d seen.  I won’t give the details, but there was very much a horrifying tragedy about his life, a desperation that I think at age 16, was too big for us his classmates to comprehend or take in.
• Blogger Richard Rushfield • Regarding his former high school classmate, Gary Coleman, who died on Friday. Rushfield makes it clear that Coleman’s great tragedy is that he was forced into a lifestyle that wasn’t normal and milked him of his fortune, but more importantly, of a normal life. “As I grew older and watched now from afar, the reports his life get stranger and stranger, it became more clear how much what had happened in those days had cost him,” Rushfield writes. source

• 1.9% of all tweets were about Hopper’s death source

• How does it compare? It drew less than half the attention of Coleman’s on a slower day. (That factoid has been tweeted a lot today, by the way.) Part of it might be due to the sheer shock of Coleman’s versus Hopper’s more-known health problems.