Back in January during his MacWorld Keynote Address, Steve Jobs hinted that Apple was going to be really busy launching new products and innovations this year. True to his word, there's a lot coming out of Cupertino these days.

Here's a rundown of announcements and rumours for February:

• New iPod Touch and iPhones were released earlier this month with twice as much memory as previous models
• New MacBooks and MacBook Pros just shipped, with another refresh due in June
• O2 annouced the iPhone launch for Ireland, with Austria rumored to be close behind
• A media event scheduled for March 6 will discuss "Enterprise" and launch the official SDK for the iPhone (and iPod touch).
• More rumours are circulating about a 3G iPhone coming sometime mid-year

Since the beginning of the year, Apple's stock has dropped by 40%, from a high of $198 per share at the end of December '07 to a low of $119 earlier this week. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that now would be a good time to order a slice of AAPL pie "a la mode". :)

In other podcast-related news... Those consumer-centric media geniuses at Apple have come up with a new way to make the podcast format even more powerful and consumable. The following patent application surfaced this week at the USPTO:

CREATION, MANAGEMENT AND DELIVERY OF PERSONALIZED MEDIA ITEMS

Abstract

Improved techniques to facilitate generation, management and delivery of
personalized media items for users are disclosed. Users are able to
influence or control content within a media item being personalized. In
one embodiment, personalized media items are podcasts. Users are able to
influence or control the content in or with a podcast. In other words, a
podcast can be created in accordance with a user's needs or
specifications so that the content within a podcast is customized or
personalized for the user.

So what does that mean? In broad-strokes, it's a framework that will allow you to program your own podcast "mixes", by taking segments of your favourite podcast sources, and combining them together in the order you want. Like traditional podcasts, it will allow you to subscribe to your new mix so every day you could get your custom-blended mix of news, commentary, music, etc.. If you currently subscribe to 15 different podcasts, and you only want to hear specific segments from each one, combined in a single show, this will allow you to do just that. Obviously it's going to be designed to work perfectly with Apple's iTunes application and sync to the iPod and AppleTV devices.

The images below, from Apple's patent application, demonstrate how it might work:

Here's another way to look at it: you're hungry for pizza but you don't want to order a "Pepperoni" or "Vegetarian" pizza. You want it customised with your favourite toppings. Just the way YOU like it. In other words, Apple's idea is kinda like ordering a custom podcast pizza.

Is it news if nothing's happened? That's the question I found myself asking this morning as I ran through my RSS feeds.

Yesterday I posted about some tech industry gossip, but was careful to qualify the information as purely unsubstantiated rumor. It's not as if I actually called Bill Gates' publicist to confirm he had cancelled his Facebook account, and I didn't IM Larry and Sergei to confirm whether or not they had bought Bebo. As it turned out, the Bebo acquisition rumor was quashed by the end of the day, and tech columnists went back to speculating about who bought Plaxo.

But the biggest non-story of them all, the one that has generated more speculation than Brangelina's pregnancy, is the ongoing saga of the Yahoo! fire-sale. The only thing that has actually happened so far is Microsoft officially issued an offer, and Yahoo! officially turned it down. Since then there have been rumors that Yahoo! has been talking to Google, and more recently News Corp. about possible alternative deals. Obviously Yahoo!'s shareholders are the ones who are most interested in how this plays out, so Jerry Yang has sent them a letter explaining why they turned down Microsoft's offer. But how much of this news is actually worth paying attention to, since no transaction has actually occurred?

Which brings me back to my original question: is it really news if nothing has actually happened, or is it just gossip? To get to the root of the question, I just had to ask myself who actually benefits from this endless back-and-forth speculation. The answer, is pretty obvious: the publishers who are generating ad revenue from all those page views! Every entertainment publisher knows that nothing generates a good buzz like a little celebrity gossip, and in the tech industry that model seems to apply equally well. So the answer seems to be that it doesn't really matter whether it's truth or rumor, just as long as people are eating it up.

Seems like every startup these days is launching a new product or service with "social networking" features. And predictably, every old-school web property is either retooling their current offering (or acquiring another company) to provide similar features and functionality. So what gives? Why has everything suddenly become so... social? And more importantly, what does it mean for us as a species?

In the old days of the Web, one of the key selling points of this great new technology called the Internet was anonymity. For the first time ever, you could get access to, what seemed at the time like, an unlimited amount of information, without anyone else knowing what you were up to. Initially, this basically meant two things: porn and bomb-making. At least, that's what my peers were really excited about back in '94. But things really exploded when e-commerce came along and suddenly you could buy virtually anything anonymously, including everything from clothing (lingerie) to hardware (sex toys), to books (porn) and movies (more porn). Oh, and of course you could finally complete your childhood collection of ultra-rare Star Wars action figures. Life was wonderful back then, and none of your family, friends, or colleagues had to know about it.