Breitbart’s big splash The campaign against ACORN was first posted by BigGovernment.com, which just launched and made a huge initial splash with the video. The site is run by Andrew Breitbart, who’s probably best known as the other guy working on Drudge Report.
ACORN hit – hard As a result of the faked prostitution video, the Senate voted yesterday to deny funding for housing and community grants. The vote went 83-7, which is pretty much a death sentence for the organization. All because someone wanted to be Borat.
A lawsuit’s comingAnd for what it’s worth, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles targeted the organization. Giles says she “saw the ACORN Housing location in Baltimore as a target — the den of a giant corrupt lion.” ACORN plans to sue both Fox News and BigGovernment.com. source
We like their new advertising service, though. Technorati, a fairly well-known blog search engine that feels like it’s fighting a little bit of irrelevance thanks to Twitter and Facebook, is looking to have some blogs of its own. A number of people got invites from the service to become writers for the site, which is a little strange because of the fact that their main service facilitates traffic for other blogs. We’ll be keeping our eye out. source
One CEO’s criticism Perennial startup CEO Michael Robertson, most famously of the jerked-around MP3.com, claims that Lala’s model attempts to lock users into evil major-label-supported DRM for their most popular product, ten-cent web songs. He pointed specifically to a patent they own. Robertson has a personal claim, by the way – he currently owns competitor MP3tunes.com.
Lala’s defense Lala, which we use here pretty regularly (it hosts our Saturday Mixtape feature), claims that there’s nothing nefarious about what’s going on. “We’re trying to provide a way so that users can have more access to their music than they had in the past,” says CEO Geoff Ralston. It’s important to note, by the way, that you can also buy MP3s of most songs available at the site. source
-$2.8 billionlosses the post office suffered in 2008; it’ll be worse in 2009 despite an increase in the price of stamps to 44¢ in May.
-5.2 billionfewer pieces of mail got shipped last quarter from the same period a year ago. Officials say it could get worse; layoffs are in the works. source