Of course, it's highly-compressed digital audio, and therefore pretty crappy. But I have to admit, the offerings go well beyond the pop selected for the Jonas Brothers' playlist — while I'm sure the cashiers at Amoeba Records might still sneer at the selection's depth, my searches for everything from Os Mutantes to Gas Huffer, Blind Willie McTell to Mongo Santamaria came up with multiple tracks to choose from. Eventually. The site is currently running incredibly slow, which may be a good sign of interest or a critical fumble of the launch. Users frustrated in the process of creating playlists might just go back to Last.fm, Imeem, iTunes or any of a number of other places to preview and purchase tracks.

The New York Times reports that between shots of hard liquor at the office yesterday, one Lehman employee shouted: “Are they going to take my BlackBerry? Come on, come get it.” Oh, they will. Research in Motion's BlackBerry sales were already disappointing in August. With Lehman expected to lay off most of its 29,000 Lehman employees, Merill Lynch and Bank of America expected to cut some 20,000, and plenty of Bear Stearns bankers still unemployed, September could be worse. Their ex-employers may not repossess the hardware, but RIM makes its steadiest profits from the recurring monthly service fees paid by businesses to push corporate email to the devices.

New York's most successful tech company is financial information provider Bloomberg, which somehow manages to charge companies thousands of dollars a year per subscription for access to the terminals that every Wall Street trader has on his or her desk. But with Lehman cutting 29,000 and Bank of America cutting another 20,000, Bloomberg's already low-volume business just got smaller at a time when it is facing redoubled competition from Thomson Reuters.

The benefit of a merger between the likes of Bank of America and Merrill Lynch is that the new company can combine their infrastructures and cut redundant costs. Unfortunately for IP telephony provider Cisco, it's one of those redundant costs. After flirting with Avaya for a couple of years, Merrill Lynch returned as a Cisco client in 2005. Last May, Cisco announced it would deploy 100,000 phones to Bank of America. When clients combine, vendors lose.

On February 27, 2007, Salesforce.com announced its largest deal ever, signing Merrill Lynch as a client and adding 25,000 new subscribers. How will Salesforce.com fare now Merrill and those 25,000 accounts are moving to Bank of America? At worst, Bank of America will insist Merill's brokers and their assistants use the Soffront CRM software the bank signed up for in March. At best, Salesforce.com will lose several thousand accounts as the new company seeks to reduce reduncancies and lays off as many as 20,000.

Investment bank Marlin and Associates helped Rupert Murdoch and News Corp's subsidiary Fox Interactive find MySpace, but otherwise it's been Lehman Brothers advisers bringing their favorite startup clients to the Murdoch empire. IGN Entertainment hired Lehman in the summer of 2005 and sold to Fox Interactive in the fall. Then in April 2007, photo-sharing site Photobucket hired the investment bank only to sell to Fox in May of the same year. Without Lehman Brothers, how will News Corp. grow on the Web?

DeWolfe and his MySpace cohort, Tom Anderson, renewed their contracts last fall with News Corp. last year for $15 million apiece, spread over two years. Paying that amount has, FIM executives believe, left nothing for them. "They're pissed," says our tipster.

Then again, do these puffed-up Fox executives deserve much more than they're getting? Pop quiz: Name a Fox Interactive property other than MySpace.

Instead of a deeper look at why the Google-MySpace partnership is failing, the Journal produced an explainer on MySpace's nearly-year old "hyptertargeting" ad product — the one that, according to the Journal, enables MySpace to double the amount it charges advertisers by categorizing users "into more than 1,000 'buckets,' including rodeo watchers, scrapbook enthusiasts and Dancing With the Stars viewers." Concert organizer Live Nation and shoemaker Adidas bought some inventory and walked away pleased, the story tells us.

One problem: like all behavioral targeting technology, "hypertargeting" faces increased scrutiny from Congressmen on a privacy kick. Another problem: targeted or no, many marketers don't believe MySpace users pay any attention to ads while they're cruising each other's profiles.

Arrington desperately wants to sell, that's for sure. But a Fox Interactive-TechCrunch linkup makes little sense on the surface — Fox Interactive chief Peter Levinsohn is said to loathe Arrington, or at least dislike him. And yet Levinsohn, who has practically no control over Fox Interactive's largest business, MySpace, might conceivably be eager to buy a tech blog which gives him, if not traffic, some industry clout. After all, that's why Murdoch owns the reportedly unprofitable New York Post.

But the biggest problem with an Arrington deal is, well, Arrington. Recent rumors had AOL acquiring TechCrunch for $30 million. That deal didn't go forward, we're hearing, because AOL worried about Arrington's mental stability and doubted whether the brand would survive if the mercurial blogger left. As one prospective buyer put it: "We're worried about buying it and him leaving, and we're worried about buying it and him staying." Before being acquired by CBS, CNET, too, took a long look at TechCrunch, only to decide too much of its value was tied up in the volatile blogger.

Arrington is ready to check out. He was recently heard talking about plans to retire to Hawaii; other Valley sources say he's been spending a lot of time up in Tahoe. It would be the height of irony if Arrington's willingness to let go was what finally greased the wheels for a deal.

But without Arrington, is TechCrunch worth anything? That's the question. And that's why everyone's still talking. Arrington, a master of the deal-gossip game, could well be floating these rumors himself — both talk of a deal with News Corp., and signs of his pending departure — to get AOL to come back to the table. Will it get his company sold? Maybe to AOL, a company gullible enough to buy an also-ran social network like Bebo. But not to News Corp., home to the ultimate media spinner.

• Online sales and operations account manager, Google
• Content acquisition intern, IODA
• Customer support specialist, Fox Interactive, MySpace division
• Windows support professional, Microsoft
• Part-time guide, Mahalo

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

(Photo of Arrington and Scoble by Brian Caldwell)

We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it is harder than we thought to get our ad network to work with social networks. When you are in social network, it is not likely that you'll buy a washing machine. It is not a long term problem but it is taking us longer than we thought.

• Moderate or review content (images, video, user postings, and other user generated content) to ensure content adheres to MySpace Terms of Use and guidelines
  
• Be knowledgeable on the MySpace Terms of Use
  
• Remove or escalate content that violates Terms of Use
  
• Meet productivity and quality targets
  
• Assist on special projects as needed

Meet your customer: JeNNaLyN.
Estimated pay: $33,000. Apply!

Next: Database Administrator (Temporary), Google, contracted through WorkforceLogic

(Photo by Robert Scoble)

A source tells us that the site's founder, who's never taken funding and brags on the Newgrounds "about page" that "we're still 100 percent independent and love what we do," is said to be happy collecting "millions" in revenue and is uninterested in a sale. According to Quantcast, Newgrounds sees about 1.5 million monthly uniques.

We've heard Levinsohn likes to trade on his MySpace-to-News Corp. deal by "bullying around little startups, demanding special deals because he's a famous 'CEO'." Problem is, Levinsohn may have run Fox Interactive, the News Corp. company that purchased MySpace, but he never exactly wrested control of MySpace, the only Fox Interactive property that matters, away from Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. Levinsohn's attitude is known to irk the Valley's influential, particularly angel investor Ron Conway.

Still, we applaud Microsoft's selection. Joining ComVentures, now renamed Velocity Interactive Group, at the expense of two partners last December, Levinsohn neatly proved his worth in a knife fight.

During a panel held yesterday at Ad:tech San Francisco, Emo, told the audience that Fox Interactive still isn't sure how it will target ads on partners' sites. "It's still in the works," Emo said. "We're probably going to use every piece of data we have to provide as well rounded and robust of a solution as possible." We love the sweet stench of such claptrap, but why didn't Emo just say "I dunno" and move on? That seems truthier.

Turns out Blodget, the disgraced stock analyst turned blogger, has a point. And if MySpace parent-company News Corp. shares this view — that Fox Interactive is in trouble because of MySpace's slow-growing worldwide traffic — perhaps its no wonder Rupert Murdoch was seen hanging around Bebo, the social network which is officially "looking for funding" and unofficially looking for a buyer. Here's a look at Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all together on the world stage.

(Photo by jonrawlinson)

Last we heard from the social network, Bebo had just hired a bank in order to find a buyer. A flack soon hushed acquisition talk, saying the company was just looking to get more funding. Murdoch's appearance belies that spin, however.

Why buy Bebo? Three words: Britain, Britain, Britain. According to Hitwise, while MySpace was the no. 10 most visited site in the U.K., Bebo came ahead at No. 7. Murdoch's not known to happily stay in second place, especially in a key market like the U.K.

He's lost every single motion he's charged against us. It's like when Mike Tyson kept trying to win this fight, and the guy kept getting up, and Tyson kept knocking him down.

It's kinda sad...two years before we bought the company, they kicked him out. For a guy who got $40 or 50 million from the sale, I mean...life's too short.

[Spoken onstage at Web 2.0 Summit]