I have done my part to promote Last.FM. I am fascinated by online social networking and take ideas I pick up in one area (i.e., music) to inform my thinking about others (education). As a promoter of this service, I feel I should share the following information. It appears that Last.FM may share information about your music collection with the RIAA. No, I do not have an illegal copy of the soon to release U2 CD as mentioned in the TechCrunch post. Last.FM uses scrobbling if you want to keep track of music you place on your computers and ipod. As I understand it, scrobbling means various programs send a little data to a centralized database and these data are accumulated to provide a picture of activities conducted with these programs (the music you play). You can share these data with othes and perhaps use common interests to learn about related, but new music. However, if you do this, it appears the recording industry may also be exploring your music collection. I guess anyone can look.
If you care, here is the record of the last 68,000+ songs played on my various devices.