The headline looks somewhat foreboding - something you'd hear townspeople say after that quiet guy who never said anything finally snapped. "You know, on first impression, he was a friendly neighborhood geek. We had no idea he was building an atomic destablizer in his basement..."

Yet today I learned that the new "Entrepreneurial City" blog characterized us as just this, potentially a "friendly neighborhood geek" with generous punctuation. In the site's analysis of top Silicon Valley blogs, a cursory glance at the louisgray.com fare called it "a classic blog that’s not trying to be anything else".

Somehow, I think that's a compliment. Rather than pretending I'm breaking news on the blog or releasing new software code every few minutes, our blog aims to bring to light those things I find interesting, with the occasional mix of satire, sarcasm and off-beat observations. If I can keep myself entertained in the process, that's a bonus.

So, Enterpreneurial City, thanks for the note. We hope not to let you down.

If Steve Jobs were to create a blog, how popular do you think it would be? Yesterday, Jobs posted a note on Apple's Hot News section of the company Web site, saying that Digital Rights Management (DRM) was the product of a few large music labels, and that Apple would be happy to not use DRM if allowed. This ran contrary to most thinking, which believes that Apple embraces DRM, in order to tie the iTunes Music Store to the iPod. His comments set the blogosphere ablaze.

Some of the highlights:

Don Dodge: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs agree - DRM is broken
PaidContent: This Just In: Steve Jobs To Music DRM: Drop Dead
Blog Maverick: What should the music biz do next?
Robert Scoble: Steve Jobs: world’s best linkbaiter
TechCrunch: Apple Openly Supports Death of DRM

Yet, there was more going on besides a bunch of chatter about iTunes. This morning, I was surprised to learn that Sacramento Kings player Ron Artest had recently had his Great Dane taken away from him by the local ASPCA, as the animal was malnourished. Artest, a millionaire ballplayer with a spotty track record, says it's not his fault, but that his bulldog ate the Great Dane's food. Even so... that's no excuse, and I said so this morning on Sactown Royalty.

Sactown Royalty: "The Man" Says Artest Doesn't Feed "The Dog"

To see what I'm finding interesting, bookmark or subscribe to my link blog.

One of the goals I have in writing for The Apple Blog is to put out ideas that may not be in the mainstream for Mac users. I hope I can introduce new software products that many aren't familiar with, or to comment on trends, like seeing Apple go to a nearly all-white lineup, or suggest that some products aren't growing as well as others, as I did with questioning iWork's success.

Today, I said that I feel Apple should make a change with iTunes (see: Apple Should Drop Notion of “Purchased Music”), in that they shouldn't highlight songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store as "Purchased". The inference I gain from iTunes' designation is that everything not purchased from iTunes would be not "Purchased", i.e. "Stolen". The best example of this would be a dual-CD set I just bought in New York. While I paid $18.99 for it, iTunes doesn't mark it as "Purchased", but just sifts the items in my library, as if they were downloaded for free (i.e. illegal) or ripped from a friend's copy.

So far, despite the article's stirring up conversation, many of the comments are quite negative. It seems everybody thought my suggestion fairly daft. One says, "Please take off your Che Guevara t-shirt and put down your anti-drm protest sign long enough to pay attention." Another says, "I think you are a way overly sensitive on this one." Then they pile on. One says, "Make peace with your iTunes and you will find peace in yourself," while one adds, "No ones saying you stole anything…martyr-complex much?" and another... "You’re corporate paranoia has gone just a tad into the red zone."

Typos aside, everybody thinks I'm reading too much into it, that Apple is not saying I stole the other 2,000+ tracks from iTunes, only that they weren't purchased from the iTunes Music Store. And of course, they're probably right. I was instead suggesting that the wording could be changed.

It's largely believed that Google Video will censor pornography or adult material from being uploaded to the company's video service. While in large part that may be true, that you can't find hot, steamy triple-X action on the site in the standard results, a quick stop over to the "Top 100" popular videos shows that Google Video users are just as interested in seeing a little skin as anything else.

Among tonight's "Top 10" films, you can see the titles hint and titillate users with names such as "Hot Girls", "Lesbos", "Sex Without Condoms", a video titled "First allowed Porn? XXX?" and "Barbie Girl". Beyond the Top 10, the themes are much the same... "Naked Kristina", "Spice Girls - Naked", "Giving Birth" and "Hot Sexy Webcam Girl". (See the screenshot from tonight here)

Hardly the PG and PG-13 landscape I might have naively expected.

Just this week, the hubbub over copyright issues surrounding Viacom's takedown notice to YouTube (a Google property) brought to light the issue of automatic filtering. Mark Cuban, the Broadcast.com-made billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner, said that the search engine was likely using filters to block out racy images, with the help of some manual labor.

He writes...

"Is there anyone out there who really believes that the Google and Youtube "communities" scans all 60k daily uploads to protect those that might be offended by a nipple flash or two?"

While there is a separate, hidden channel, for more adult themes, Google Video and YouTube largely promote themselves as family-friendly sites, but it's clear to me, at least, that on the Web, porn is still king. Porn sites helped push the Web forward in its infancy, toward e-commerce, and pop-up windows, and significant innovation.

While those really, truly, looking for hard-core porn could find it elsewhere, Google Video now looks like it has a place as a soft-core alternative.