Not long ago I stopped pirating music as iTunes provided me with a great interface and a quick and easy way to get the music that I like. Additionally, I finally had some excess cash to spend on music! Since yesterday morning I’ve been trying to buy music from iTunes and I haven’t been able to. I’m not the only one. I have spoken with a number of people who are experiencing the same issue. iTunes sells millions of dollars of music through their store daily so they have to be losing some serious cash on this one.

Is it time to short Apple’s stock? Not yet. Apple’s primary revenue source is currently their hardware offerings (iPhone, iPod and their computers). This is annoying though and I might be forced to start pirating the music that I want. In this age of instant gratification,¬†temporary service outages can mean the loss of purchases and the loss of customers. Outages for days and you have serious problems. I have no idea what the cause of this issue is but I’m sure Apple is working hard to resolve the issue.

I posted the issue in the Apple forums and the only response I’ve been receiving is confirmation from other users that are having the same issue. Are you experiencing the same thing?

Over the past few months I have been hyping up a new project. Each of those projects have slowly morphed into another eventually resulting in the current one: The Social Times. The Social Times is my attempt at covering the social web while hosting events that help active participants in the social web connect offline. The first event that I’m hosting is the Social Times launch event. We currently have the following sponsors and demos attending the event:

• Wine Library TV
• Freewebs
• Hungry Machine LLC
• Qloud
• Razoo
• Clearspring
• Why Go Solo

I will be announcing more demos and sponsors over the next few days. The event is going to be December 13th in downtown D.C. If you would like to attend, go register for the Social Times launch event. This is probably the most ambitious project I have ever taken on. I am looking to turn this into a national entity in the next 6 to 12 months. I will be sure to document the lessons learned on this blog so you can hear about the trials and tribulations.

I have chosen to go without seed funding from investors and am instead funding it myself. This will be an amazing experience and a massive challenge. I’m excited! I hope that each of you can be part of the journey. See you at the finish line

According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the D.C. metro area has the second highest concentration of I.T. professionals in the U.S. next to Silicon Valley. For all those that are trying to help put the D.C. tech community together, it appears as though this is a pretty good goal given the density. Conversely, it should be noted that just because we have the second highest density of I.T. professional doesn’t mean that we have the second highest volume of startups.

There are a number of large companies whose focus is strictly on I.T. services for the government. I would guess that those companies make up the majority of I.T. professionals in the area, but I don’t have the numbers to back it up. Also, the average salary for someone in the I.T. industry living in the D.C. metro area is approximately $122,950. Not bad! Congrats D.C.!

Dave Winer has published the Techmeme top 100 blogs. If you hadn’t heard already, Techmeme is releasing a new tech blog leaderboard tomorrow. My other blog AllFacebook.com has come in 62 on the list. Not bad for starting the blog a few months ago!

People that rank lower on the scale include Financial Times, USA Today, Mashable!, O’Reilly Radar and Valleywag. It’s pretty awesome to see hard work paying off. Rather than embellishing on it (p.s. I am officially a dork), I’d like to post an overview of how to launch a top blog. I’ll be posting some follow-up posts over the coming days to give a thorough overview.

Steve Case and Ted Leonsis are back in a big way. According to Ted’s blog, Revolution LLC (the parent company of Revolution Health), is launching Revolution Money. Revolution money allows secure payment transfers for free online! This is going to be a major blow to Paypal and Google Checkout, especially to Google given that they failed to revolutionize the credit industry when they had the opportunity.

So how does the new company make money? Through a new payment technology system, Revolution Money has cut the costs of credit card fees to merchants down to 0.5% from an average of 1.9% per sale. Currently, these fees, called interchange fees, total a whopping $56 billion each year. This company plans on putting a serious dent in it and chances are they will succeed.

I’m surely going to start using the system when it launches to receive payments online and if I owned a store I would surely integrate this into my point of sale system. One company after the next seems to be launching in D.C. so this is great times! If you want to become an active member of the D.C. technology scene then go sign up for the DC Technology Network on Ning. Big thanks to Justin Thorp for putting it together.

A blog post just surfaced in regards to Microsoft’s decision to offer Microsoft Office to students for $60. They also provided a link to TheUltimateSteal.com which references this great value. All you need to do is enter your email address. I entered my email address and it didn’t check to see if I had a .EDU email address or not. The clock then proceeded to countdown and eventually say “This Deal is Now Available.”

There was no link though and now the clock has been reset. Kind of fishy, no? I looked up the domain and found that it wasn’t registered to Microsoft and instead was registered to “Mr. Youth, LLC” in New York city. For some reason I think this domain may just be a scam. Anybody else experience this?

I just wanted to take the opportunity to mention that “Crank That” by “Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em” is the number one song on iTunes. I hadn’t heard the song until now. Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em also has a few classics such as “Let Me Get Em” and “Materialistic Bitch.” In case you haven’t heard the song, I’ve posted the lyrics below. I think it’s time that we all stop what we are doing and come up with a song.

Lyrics to Solja Boy Tell ‘Em – Crank That

[Chorus] (Repeat 2x)
Soulja Boy up in it (OH!)
Watch Me Crank It
Watch Me Roll
Watch Me Crank Dat Soulja Boy,
that Super Man Dat (OH!)
Now Watch Me Do
(Crank Dat Soulja )
Now Watch Me Do
(Crank Dat Soulja )
Now Watch Me Do
(Crank Dat Soulja )
Now Watch Me Do
(Crank Dat Soulja )
Soulja Boy up in it (OH!)
[Verse 1]
Soulja Boy up in it (OH!)
Watch Me Lean And Watch Me Rock
Super Man Dat (OH!)
Then Watch Me Crank Dat Robocop
Super Fresh, Now Watch Me Jock
Jocking On Them Haterz Man
When I Do Dat Soulja Boy
I Lean To The Left And Crank Dat Dance
(Now You)
I’m Jocking On Yo Bitch Ass
And If We Get The Fightin
Then I’m Cocking On Your Bitch
You Catch Me At Yo Local Party
Yes I Crank It Everyday
Haterz Get Mad Cuz
“I Got Me Some Bathin Apes”
[Repeat Chorus 2x]

I’m Bouncin On My Toe
Watch Me Super Soak Dat (OH!)
I’ma Pass It To Arab
Then He Gon Pass It To The Low (Low)
Haterz Wanna Be Me
Soulja Boy, I’m The Man
They Be Lookin At My Neck
Sayin Its The Rubberband Man (Man)
Watch Me Do It (Watch Me Do It)
Dance (Dance)
Let Get To It (Let Get To It)
Nope, You Can’t Do It Like Me
Hoe, So Don’t Do It Like Me
Folk, I See You Tryna Do It Like Me
Man That Shit Was Ugly
[Repeat Chorus 2x]

That’s all there is to the song! My favorite line is “I Got Me Some Bathin Apes.” I have no idea what that means. I’m not quite sure what else to say about this.

It took them long enough! Back in January I came up with five things that I’d like to see on Google Reader. 9 months later, they have added one of them. I guess that’s not too bad of a job considering they knocked out the largest item. Last night Google announced search for Google reader.

When I have thousands of feed articles that I browse through on a daily basis, it is impossible to retain all that information in my head. All I remember is snippets of information that I can then go back and reference. Thank god for the new feature. I have yet to take advantage of it but I know that this is going to be an insanely useful feature.

If any of the other feed readers are going to have a shot at maintaining a significant market share, they are going to have to add search. It’s as simple as that. Good luck indexing the millions of articles that people are reading though. Given that it took Google so long to launch this feature leads me to believe that this is a large technical achievement by their team. Alternatively, perhaps they were sitting on the beach for most of the summer thanks to their stock options. Who knows! One thing is for sure, Google Reader is still my feed reader of choice.

Update!
Google also added one of my other recommendations. They have upped the number of feed items that are displayed next to each subscription. Rather than saying “100+” every time your feed gets over 100, it displays the total number up until 1000 at which point it displays “1000+.” Great move! Google Reader has definitely received a serious upgrade.

I’ve just learned that my good friend Gary Vaynerchuk is going to appear on the Conan O’Brien show tomorrow night. That’s huge! For those of you don’t know who Gary is, he was one of the sponsors of our past Tech Cocktail (which we will have news about the next one in the next day or so) and is the creator of Wine Library TV. If you haven’t seen his show, it is a must see. Gary brings his contagious personality and high energy to wine tasting. I have included a copy of yesterday’s episode below. Gary’s goal is to bring wine appreciation to the masses in the United States and it looks like he will have accomplished that with his appearance on Conan this Wednesday. Gary will officially have gone mainstream and if anyone deserves it, Gary does. He is always available for his readers and friends and is one of the most giving people I know. If you want to meet Gary, shoot him an email. I’m sure he’ll respond to you.

This weekend news surfaced that Google has put aside a $4.6 billion war chest to try and obtain the 700 MHz spectrum. If Google succeeded they could provide unlimited wireless broadband internet to cell phones and computers. As Mike Arrington highlights, Google wants to have four “key platform rules” adopted:

1. Open applications
2. Open devices
3. Open services
4. Open networks

See anything consistent there? They want to open it all up. In return they will bid $4.6 billion. This would be massive and something that consumers would thoroughly support. The only problem? AT&T and Verizon. They are lobbying hard against having this approved. That’s completely understandable given that Google’s offering would deal a massive blow to the two companies. When it comes down to what is in the consumer’s best interest though, the FCC needs to look past the lobbyists just as Mike Arrington suggested. Unfortunately the FCC doesn’t have a clean slate having not acted in the consumer’s best interests many times before. Will they do it again? I sure hope not.

Definitely not but one thing is for sure, Google is going to have to become a little more tame. After snapping up over 13,000 employees and a large number of companies, Google has missed earnings. Many had been predicting that this was going to be the burst of the Web 2.0 bubble, myself included. Google’s miss was not horrendous considering that they still posted a relatively spectacular of 28 percent. Previous to this though Google had never improved less than 60 percent. The valley’s darling has made a misstep. Under hiring and over acquiring. It was bound to happen but the real question is whether or not there will be any significant fallout from this. One thing is for sure: the rapid Google buyout strategy that many startups had been hoping for the past couple of years will now become a less realistic option.

As I mention on my AllFacebook blog today, it looks like the tide is rapidly shifting in Silicon Valley. Facebook seems to be rapidly acquiring many of the Google developers that are looking for more pre-IPO options. Not a bad choice for a talented developer. So will it all come crashing down? Probably not but this is probably a serious reality check for a lot of people in the technology industry.

According to Reuters, Universal Music has chosen not to sign a long-term agreement with iTunes. This is to provide other competitors with the opportunity to sign exclusive agreements. This would be a huge blow to Apple given that Universal Music Group produces one third of all music in the United States. I wonder if this would be a larger blow to Apple or to Universal given that iTunes has such a dominant position in the digital music industry. With all of the iPods and now iPhones being sold in the U.S., many of the Apple brand owners choose to use iTunes to purchase their music. Will they all go rushing to the competitors once one third of their music is no longer available via iTunes? While there is no way to tell what will happen, this is a huge blow to a company that is now seemingly on top of the world. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out.