Bloggasm

City in Montana requires job applicants to hand over all social network logins and passwords for background checks

Bozeman City, Montana now asks all applicants for jobs to ‘Please 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.,’ the City form states. There are then three lines where applicants can list the Web sites, their user names and log-in information and their passwords.

You get squabbles over whether Craigslist will bring in $100 million or $300 million this year. You get debates over whether Facebook is, in fact, profitable. And you even have wildly different estimations, some of which claim that YouTube is losing massive amounts of money while others estimate that it’s actually pulling in a profit.

YouTube is much closer to breaking even than widely thought, says a firm with intimate knowledge of global infrastructure costs. A widely publicized Credit Suisse report that said Google would lose $470 million on the site this year neglected to account for factors such as peering traffic, wholesale bandwidth deals and cheap data center locations. Where the bank said YouTube’s costs will amount to $711 million in 2009, RampRate, a San Francisco-based company that advises large companies on IT infrastructure, says the actual cost is $415 million

Make My Wish Come True: A million sign ups to meet Kathy Griffin.

I’m a D-List AIDS Celebrity who’s been living with HIV for well over twenty years.

After meeting a guy who lost his left nut to testicular cancer in Australia during his “Make A Wish” trip, even though he was in remission, got me thinking, “When am I getting my wish”

So I’ve decided to make my wish come true cause nobody’s going to do it for me.

My wish is to meet my hero and role model Kathy Griffin. She is who she is and fuck anyone who dosen’t like it.

I know Kathy has a lot of gays, but she doesn’t have an out HIV positive one [Editor's Note: GAG] We’re in these days.

She is my inspiration for my AIDS activism through comedy.

So me and a friend, who’s in love with Kathy’s mom’s Gay, (well more like the love that lasts an hour or two) and I are embarking on a quest to meet Kathy Griffin.

The first step is this group, please, I’ve been dying since August 1987, and that’s a long time. Please help me make my wish come true.

In addition to the facebook drive, we are making a documentary of this journey to meet our super hero and raise awareness on HIV.

Quite frankly I’m way too lazy to swim the English Channel or push a wheelchair across Canada.

Stalking my super hero is much more within my physical abilities.

Thanks for joining me on this quest.

If you’re wondering what I think about such Facebook groups, read my post “1,000,000 strong for [insert cause here]”

This is a little unsettling. Political correspondents for the New York Times trolled Facebook and messaged random 16-year-old friends of Cindy McCain’s daughter and this is what they sent to them:

I’m a reporter at the New York Times, writing a profile of Cindy McCain, and we are trying to get a sense of what she is like as a mother. So I’m reaching out to fellow parents at her kids’ schools.

Something about this just strikes me as creepy.

Many analysts agree that once social networking sites get their shit together that they’ll be prime real-estate for advertisers, primarily because they have so much personal info on their users, which in turn means highly-personalized ads. But other than the controversial Beacon program I haven’t seen much evidence for this until today.

When I logged into my account today I saw this ad in my news feed:

As most of you know, I’m a journalist. It wouldn’t be too hard to ascertain this from my Facebook profile — given that I’m listed as an English major grad and my place of employment is in my workplace info.

Is this just a coincidence or was Facebook able to scan my profile and deliver a targeted ad?

Either way, I did something I rarely do to advertisements on the internet: I clicked on it.

Some media-related links for your amusement:

1. What news outlets can learn from the porn industry. Let me just say that I agree with all the points made in those links. This is precisely why I announced not too long ago that I would begin covering the porn industry in this blog.

2. Tobias Buckell talks about freelancing full time and the importance of getting out of the house and socializing.

3. Ebook sales for the Sony Reader are still outpacing the sales for Amazon’s Kindle.

4. The perils of taking a press release and flipping it without making any follow-up phone calls.

5. Yes! Facebook is taking measures to cut down on the spam effect of its platform applications.

6. Those internet trolls that plague message boards? A court ruled that they can remain anonymous.

7. From Gizmodo: “If there was ever a time for a band to try going completely independent, this is it. Why give over 90% of your income away to greedy sleazebags when you can sell your music online without the middleman? This industry needs to be burned to the ground and built back up again; it’s broken and it seems less and less likely that it’ll be able to be fixed”