Los Angeles - Facebook drew more worldwide monthly unique visitors than rival MySpace (NYSE: NWS) in May (123.9 million vs. 114.6 million), according to comScore, while MySpace continued to lead in the lucrative U.S. market with 73.7 million monthly unique users, compared with Facebook's 35.6 million. In terms of growth, Facebook's global traffic was up 6% in May while U.S. growth was flat. MySpace saw global traffic fall 1% in May, while U.S. traffic was up 2% from the prior month.

New York - Users have reported experiencing problems with Qtrax, the free, legal peer-to-peer music download service that launched with licenses from the major labels this week, according to reports. Hypebot reported that searches for songs from many artists on major labels EMI and Universal Music returned notices that read "Coming Soon," while Wired.com said that tracks downloaded from the service initially would not play at all, but "are now playing just fine." A company representative told Wired.com, in reference to the gaps in its catalog, that "music is being added each and every day over the next few weeks in large batches."

Madrid - Spain-based broadcaster Telecinco, a unit of Italy's Mediaset, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google's (NASD: GOOG) YouTube, noting that programs the company has the rights to are showing up on YouTube before they are even broadcast in Spain, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported. The suit seeks unspecified damages. Telecinco joins a list of copyright holders suing YouTube that includes Viacom and French broadcaster TF1.

Menlo Park, Calif. - Benchmark Capital, an early-stage technology venture capital firm, has named Facebook executive Matt Cohler as a general partner. Cohler, one of the first five employees hired at Facebook in 2005, currently serves as the company's vice president of product management. He will join Benchmark in the fall and maintain a relationship with Facebook, serving as special advisor to founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Beijing - Hurray (NASD: HRAY), a Chinese music management firm, record label and wireless music distributor, announced on Friday the resignation of president, COO and acting CFO Sean Wang. Hurray said that current VP and financial controller Xiaoqing Guo will assume the role of acting CFO, but did not mention replacements for the other positions.

New York - The major players in contentious negotiations over digital music royalties, which pit music publishers, record labels and digital music services against one another, have reached a settlement on two of five major issues, Billboard reported, citing an account from David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA).

Los Angeles - After reports of tension in the executive ranks at concert promotion giant Live Nation (NYSE: LYV) -- over the company's recent spate of multi-million dollar "360 deals" with artists including Madonna and Jay-Z, the company announced on Friday that chairman Michael Cohl, also CEO of the company's Live Nation Artists division, has stepped down and resigned his seat on the company's board, effective immediately. The Wall Street Journal had recently reported that Cohl, a veteran concert promoter who had pushed the company to quickly sign additional 360 deals, had threatened to quit, facing opposition from CEO Michael Rapino, who favored a more gradual expansion of the deals.

New York - The Associated Press (AP) has released a statement saying that it has settled an issue with a blogger whom it had demanded remove several posts that quoted short excerpts from AP stories. "In response to questions about the use of Associated Press content on the Drudge Retort web site, the AP was able to provide additional information to the operator of the site, Rogers Cadenhead, on Thursday," the AP said in a statement. "That information was aimed at enabling Mr. Cadenhead to bring the contributed content on his site into conformance with the policy he earlier set for his contributors. Both parties consider the matter closed."

Paris - A proposal was introduced in France's Parliament this week that would implement a "three strikes" law compelling Internet service providers to cancel accounts of subscribers found to repeatedly infringe copyrights, according to published reports.

Los Angeles - A music blog called Antiquiet created a good deal of noise earlier this week, when it posted what are purported to be "mastered, finished" tracks from the 14-years-in-the-making Guns 'N Roses album "Chinese Democracy."

Boston - Private equity firm Bain Capital Partners has agreed to pay $441 million to acquire D&M Holdings, a Japanese manufacturer of consumer and commercial audio-visual electronics products under brands including Denon and Marantz.

New York - Despite speculation to the contrary, Microsoft (NASD: MSFT) told the Financial Times on Friday that it won't attempt to make up for its failed bid for Yahoo (NASD: YHOO) by pursuing other acquisition targets such as AOL and Facebook. "People don't understand what they're talking about," Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, told the paper. "At the end of the day, this is about the ad platform. This is not about just any one of the applications."

New York - The Orchard (NASD: ORCD), a digital distributor of independent music and other media, announced on Friday that it is the winning bidder in a bankruptcy auction to purchase TVT Records, an independent music label founded in 1985.

London - Left-leaning political news blog Huffington Post plans to expand into local news across the U.S., and is pursuing a third round of venture capital to help fund the initiative, founder Arianna Huffington said at a conference hosted by U.K. newspaper the Guardian.

San Francisco - Seesmic, a developer of live video webcam communications technology, has raised $6 million in new funding, led by Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners, VentureBeat reported.

In the Web 2.0 era, simplicity is king. No matter if you're talking about user interface, ease of use or the idea for a blog. To take the latter as an example; there are a number of great blogs out there using other people's images in creative and somewhat controversial ways. The concept is as simple as it is genious: 1. Find a topic that people can releate to. 2. Search for user generated pictures that relate to that topic on a photo-sharing service such as Flickr (the best one) or a social network. 3. Post the picture to your blog with witty commentary. 4. Watch traffic grow and comments flowing in. Three hilarious blogs built using this recipe for success that I recommend to check out is Sorry I Missed Your Party, Hot Chicks With Douche Bags and Demonbaby's MySpace Stupid Haircut Awards. Do you have any other good examples, perhaps using videos instead of photos, post a comment and share the fun!