The Twittersphere

With the growth of blogging online, the blogosphere has become an increasingly bigger force for the spread of opinion, especially in the political arena. But I've realized that a lot of the user-generated communication that I receive now comes through Twitter. Has Twitter reached the critical mass to become the Twittersphere? I think it has.

I'm highly impressed by what Twitter has become. When I started using Twitter last year, it was a fun service to use. But during the run-up to the election, it seemed like Twitter really started growing and becoming an import networking and communication tool. It's really amazing how the simple concept of Twitter has created such a rich and powerful method of interacting.

Free at last, free at last, thank Jobs almighty, we're free at last!

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is dead. Apple annouced at Macworld this week that all songs available for purchase on iTunes will soon be available with no DRM. That means no restrictions on where a song can be played or by whom. Granted, the songs will still be in Apple's AAC format, but at least they can be easily converted into MP3s for play on any computer and music player.

By this time next year, DRM will be nothing more than a bad memory of the early days of digital music adoption. With Amazon and Wal-Mart selling DRM-free MP3s for a year and Apple, early proponents of DRM, abandoning it, the major music labels are admitting that selling music with annoying copy-protection schemes did more to promote piracy than it did to discourage it.

I will most certainly be paying the incremental price to purchase DRM-free copies of all my iTunes music.