Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen were two typical college students in 1999 when they decided to harness the power of the Web. Forget file sharing, competing with Microsoft or Napster; these guys just wanted to collect all the crap that was floating around their school’s computer networks and showcase it for the world.

The end result, CollegeHumor.com, is genius in its simplicity. The site links to funny websites, stupid videos, a few (very funny) columns and some weird/hot/bizarre photos submitted by students. “We thought, if you’re a college student, you could either write for your school paper and have a thousand people see it, or you could have roughly a million people see it,” says Van Veen, whose offices are now in NYC.

With a book, The CollegeHumor Guide to College: Selling Kidneys for Beer Money, Sleeping with Professors, Majoring in Communications and Other Really Good Ideas, and more than nine million visitors hitting their site every month, the two co-founders sat down with COED in the Fall of 2005 to share their vision. (more…)

We all know how exciting it is to see a classic hit like “Don’t Stop Believin” by Journey pop up on a list of stealable downloads, saying it will only take 20 seconds until that baby is yours to keep forever. You say, “Dude. I have to download that. I don’t care if I’m stealing. It’s JOURNEY for gosh sakes.”

Tempting, I know.

And even though the government has been warning us to stop illegally downloading music, ever since the beginning days of Napster, we continue to do it anyway. We are such badasses.

Recently, however, there’s been an even bigger crackdown, and it’s college kids they’re after. With the rise of the Recording Industry Association of America, emails have been sent to hundreds of college students across the country and counting, warning them they have been caught in the act and if they don’t settle their cases out of court, they will be fined more money than college kids can afford.

MSN.com reports the case of University of Nebraska-Lincoln sophomore Sarah Barg, who received an email advising her of the fact she was caught downloading over 300 songs (some of which included songs by the Spice Girls – You’re AWESOME!) on a campus computer using Ares – a site much like Kazaa, Limewire and Bearshare. At first, she brushed off the email, as we all probably would. Some one who downloads the Spice Girls doesn’t exactly scream “evil threat to society” to me. (more…)