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An Apple director has inadvertently broken word that his company may be planning to release Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard three months earlier than expected.

Creative Commons - the non-profit that promotes legal sharing on the Internet - is on Twitter, as of about 2 hours ago. 

Music that is licensed using Creative Commons licenses has been hugely important to podcasting and new media - so you may want to consider subscribing to the “official Creative Commons microblog.”

The Mayo Clinic has a semi-monthly podcast on health issues that range from chemotherapy to Omega 3 fatty acids, to erectile dysfunction, featuring information and resources from medical experts in those respective fields.

The current Mayo Clinic podcast topic is about “Tips For Slowing The Mental Decline of Alzheimer’s.”  While not offering techniques to stop or reverse the loss of cognitive function, the eight-minute discussion does have practical ideas about slowing that loss, and for how to encourage habits help manage keeping track of things that the brain can no longer do on its own.

The feed to subscribe to the entire podcast series is here.

A California computer repair shop is likely to receive a call from Apple asking it to explain where it obtained an internal MacBook Air prototype that it later turned around and sold on eBay for $730.

Microsoft, makers of the Zune portable media player, announced a firmware update today, along with announcements of lower prices for the devices.

The 3.1 update features some new free games, refreshes the Zune Social, and adds incremental updates to the Zune software. Games in this update include Checkers, Sudoku, and Space Battle. A multiplayer mode for the Texas Hold’em poker game are also part of 3.1.

The Zune Social refresh purports to make navigation easier and includes a “like minded listeners” feature, comparing your musical tastes with others. The incremental software update improves overall software stability.

Also announced today: Zune price cuts, which take effect Wednesday (Friday in Canada). The new prices (and comparisons to similar capacity iPods), according to MobileDevicesToday:

16 GB: Zune, $179; iPod $199
8GB: Zune, $139; iPod $149
4GB: Zune, $99; no similar model iPod

The update is available now free to Zune owners. The last major update was the 3.0 update in September.

A California judge on Tuesday granted Apple's motion to dismiss counterclaims on the part of unauthorized Mac clone maker Psystar, who charged the Mac maker with violating antitrust laws through its vigorous attempts to block third parties from selling rival Mac OS X-based computers.

Apple's new MacBook lines include a form of digital copy protection that will prevent protected media, such as DRM-infused iTunes movies, from playing back on devices that aren't compliant with the new priority protection measures.

A slowing global economy had little impact on Apple's computer business last month, as consumers willingly plunked down their cash for the company's new MacBook offerings, helping to drive Mac sales up more than 25 percent year-over-year.

Amazon today announced a new service, Amazon CloudFront, that promises to speed up your site. 

It’s a simple pay-as-you-go content delivery network that offers to deliver your content to people, with Amazon-scale service, but without big upfront costs. 

Amazon has a network of “edge” network locations that it can automatically distribute your content to. These “edge” locations are data hubs placed at optimal locations on the Internet in order to minimize the network latency and speed when serving up web content. 

CloudFront has locations around the world:

 

• United States: Ashburn (VA), Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle and St. Louis
• Europe: Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt and London
• Asia: Hong Kong and Tokyo

 

These edge locations work together to direct customers’ requests to the edge location that can provide the response with the lowest latency.

Content delivery services are used by most major sites because they speed up users’ experience by getting the content closer to the user. Web pages and media files from these big sites loads quickly because the content is located as close to the user as possible on the Internet. 

At this point, Amazon’s service is likely to bring content delivery services to sites that have the resources to build custom solutions based on CloudFront.

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Following a month-long wait, Apple on Tuesday finally began taking orders for its new 24-inch LED-backlit Cinema Display through its online store, saying shipments will begin sometime later this month.

After spending 25 hours counting sales of iPhones and Macs at Apple's US-based retail chain, investment bank Piper Jaffray said it believes the company this quarter could meet or beat last quarter's record 2.6 million Mac sales total while again selling more than 6 million iPhones.

Chunghwa Telecom said Friday it has won the exclusive right to begin selling Apple's iPhone 3G in Taiwan ahead of the December holiday season.

Motrin has found itself in the middle of a new media disaster as a result of a heavy handed ad internet ad campaign campaign that makes fun of people that wear their babies in slings (above).

The narration takes a poke at moms (and dads) that wear baby slings - suggesting that they are akin to a fashion accessory:

Wearing your baby seems to be in fashion. I mean, in theory it’s a great idea. There’s the front baby carrier, sling, schwing, wrap, pouch. And who knows what else they’ve come up with. Wear your baby on your side, your front, go hands free. Supposedly, it’s a real bonding experience.

The video isn’t extremely offensive, but it’s unfunny and disrespectful of the audience it’s trying to target.

The result?

A lot of pissed-off parents. Parents that have tweeted about it, called for a boycott, and even created a response video.

Here’s a graph of Twitter mentions of “motrin” for the last few days:

Unfortunately for Motrin, nearly all the buzz is negative.

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If you’re interested in recording audio with your iPhone, you’ve got a lot of choices.

The latest option, Motion Apps’ $1.99 mVoice (App Store link), lets you record voice notes, memos, reminders, lectures, to-do’s, interviews or anything else that you don’t want to forget.

Features:

• Intuitive, easy to use and cool user interface
• Unlimited recording length - record for seconds or hours
• Customizable recording quality - from dictaphone to studio-like
• Get your recordings on PC or Mac using web browser and WiFi
• Organize your recordings into categories
• Pause / Resume recording sessions
• Powerful playback features as seen on iPod and VisualVoiceMail
• Append new audio to existing recordings

A quickly released follow-up test build of Mac OS X 10.5.6 comes with no known problems and points to Apple getting much closer to a finished patch.

President-elect Barack Obama kicks off his weekly new media address with this video.

Obama plans to publish weekly addresses to YouTube as President, a milestone in the adoption of new media. It will be a little strange to see Obama competing for views against Fred, but it’s sure to drive new audiences to Internet video.

Obama’s campaign was all over the Internet, using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among other sites. One can only wonder what other ways Obama will use Internet media over the next four years.

Mainstream Internet video startup Hulu has posted a collection of videos that explain the site’s video sharing features.

While you can’t share your personal videos on Hulu, the site at least makes it easy to embed videos in blog posts, share on social medi sites and email.

Now, if they’d just make embeddable videos permanently available!

Griffin has introduced iTalk Premium (App Store link), which is basically an ad-free version of its iTalk iPhone recording app. 

Griffin iTalk lets you record on the iPhone or 2G iPod touch. Your recordings are saved for replay on your iPhone or iPod, and you can use iTalk Sync (a free download) to drag-and-drop them as AIFF files to your computer over a Wi-Fi connection.

Features:

• Choose from Good/Better/Best quality levels.
• Pause/resume and append to existing recordings on the fly.
• Append text notes to your recordings for later reference.
• The one-button recording interface is designed for quick, easy operation in the field, and simple management of your recordings.

iTalk System Requirements: iPhone, iPhone 3G, or 2nd generation iPod touch (2G iPod Touch requires Apple Stereo Headset or similar compatible headset) Wi-Fi connection for transfer of files to computer (iTalk Sync is available for Mac OS 10.4.11+ and will be available for Windows soon)

The tug of war over the future of Mark Papermaster, an executive hired away from his post at IBM to head up Apple's handheld efforts, got a bit nastier on Thursday when the microprocessor expert countered a lawsuit from his former employer with one of his own.

Apple is facing yet another lawsuit over the performance of its iPhone 3G on AT&T's network but with added allegations that the company is ignoring the occurrence of hairline cracks in the handset's enclosure.