You’ll recall the battles between the RIAA and the technology industry over music licensing.

Hot off the press release presses: tech blog GigaOm has acquired paidContent (and parent company ContentNext) from The Guardian. Rumors of the acquisition  were first reported by Peter Kafka at AllThingsD. Wrote GigaOm founder Om Malik in a blog post : “ The ethos of paidContent and our company are in sync.

Want to win some extra visibility for your brand on Facebook? Post about current events. Brands grabbed 99.7% higher engagement on their Page posts by talking about the Super Bowl yesterday, and 60% higher engagement over the past 6 weeks compared to the average post

4 months after it launched its Twitter-style asymmetrical Subscribe feature , Facebook and its Journalist Program Manager Vadim Lavrusik’s efforts to weaken Twitter’s stranglehold on breaking news are paying off. The company  just announced that thousands of journalists now use Subscribe, including 50 reporters from The New York Times and 90 from the Washington Post. If Facebook can get your favorite journalists publishing through Subscribe, you’ll have less need for Twitter

Bleacher Report , the popular site for sports fans now boasting 22 million uniques per month, just released its Team Stream app for the iPad. Similar to Team Stream for iPhone and Android smartphones, the new Team Stream HD app features news and analysis and supports push notifications for breaking news

We get mailed a lot of stuff at TechCrunch and sometimes a good item will slip through the cracks. This iRiffPort has been sitting in my pile of gear since it came out in October. I wrote a review

This morning, Google began rolling out a major change to its core search engine that intertwines results from Google+ (and Picasa) with the ‘normal’ algorithmically-generated results we’ve come to expect. There have been plenty of critiques of the news, including John Battelle’s discussion on how this isn’t actually integrating ‘Your World’, as Google calls it, but rather just its own social network

Remember that feeling you got back when Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone, and he did the “slide to unlock” gesture for the first time? I remember the way he said it – “You like that?

Social media optimized and meme focused aggregator BuzzFeed has just raised a $15.5 million round of Series C financing, lead by New Enterprise Associates and followed on by Lerer Ventures , Hearst Media , Softbank and RRE Capital .

Facebook has AppData, Twitter has Twitaholic, and now Google+ has its own independent brand page rankings site: ZoomSphere . It shows which brands have the most followers, activity, +1s, shares, and comments, and slice the data by time, page category, and country.