Tuesday's Tech News Asides

Lots of things are going on today so I'll point you to them individually. First and foremost, Steve Jobs released a compelling letter on Apple.com entitled Thoughts on Music. In it, the Apple CEO discusses the music industry's unremitting use of digital rights management for legally distributing music online. Mr. Jobs goes on to say that this is causing a rift in DRM technologies with different companies providing different means of content protection and end up hurting the consumer who is "locked in" to a certain music player/DRM technology.

He offers three means of solving this issue, the most interesting being a proposal for music companies to drop DRM completely as it does little to hinder piracy woes anyway. Steve repeats that Apple would embrace that move wholeheartedly. I applaud Steve for going out of corporate character and fighting for something that he knows his consumers want. Rock on! Definitely worth a read in my opinion.

In other news, Anthony Cole of TheMacMind posted a brief interview with me. I talked about how I began blogging, my obsession with all things Mac, why I probably won't be purchasing an iPhone as well as offer a few tips for prospective bloggers.

Then we have Cellblock, a unique startup based around collaborative mobile photos and videos. Here's how it works. First you setup a Cellblock slideshow widget (embeddable in any site). With that you receive a special email address which you can send photos or videos to from your mobile device. Cellblock receives that content and instantly puts it in the slideshow widget. The collaborative part comes when you make that widget's email address public and let your blog readers, etc, upload content to the widget.

Update: Lifehacker Adam Pash has a great article detailing Google Reader tips and tricks; lots of powerful things I had no idea existed in Google Reader.