Teenagers and students have an average of more than 800 illegally copied songs each on their digital music players, the largest academic survey of young people’s music ownership has found.

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The average digital music player carries 1,770 songs, meaning that 48 per cent of the collection is copied illegally. The proportion of illegally downloaded tracks rises to 61 per cent among 14 to 17-year-olds. In addition, 14 per cent of CDs (one in seven) in a young person’s collection are copied.

So, how does your iPod stack up? A quick poll here is definitively “under” but we’re a squeaky clean kind of operation…

While working on a client’s premium podcast, the service that has always been a really nice way of creating a welcome interface for users (play now buttons, choice of subscribe options, etc.) totally rebuffed any attempt to make episode #1 be recognized in an mp3 enclosure. That’s fancy talk for “it didn’t work, and iTunes wouldn’t see a podcast.” I still can’t figure out if it was a Blogger problem or not, but it was officially not working… despite all the elements being there.

So, it was back to the olden days of podcasting… yep all the way back to 2004. I had to code my own source RSS feed and plug that into Feedburner. Lo and behold it worked. I wonder what people who weren’t mucking with hand rolled RSS feeds do when presented with this issue? I suspect they throw their hands in the air and give up… that’s a shame, and it shows how we have a ways to go in the industry to truly make it simple when a Blogger-Feedburner handshake won’t work on the first, second or even third try…

BTW, if you’re in the same boat I was this morning, check out the podcast feed generator. It’ll get your feed parsed out for episode one. Beyond that you have to write your own code in addition to what it spits out. Still, a handy resource in a pinch.

9:18 AM – Time Capsule, a new network attached storage device that merges the Airport Extreme with a big old hard drive. Wireless backups for your notebooks… $299/$499 (500GB/1TB)

9:22 AM -iPhone and iPod Touch get a a lot of new goodies, most notably the ability to find yourself on a Google map automatically. Nice feature. The Touch will now include a lot of apps from the iPhone, most notably Mail. Weird part? Apple’s throwing in a $20 fee for upgrading current Touch owners… kind of surprising there.

9:36 AM – iTunes Store now offers rentals… most surprisingly it includes ALL studios, including Universal. Universal owns NBS and we all remember that they yanked TV shows from the iTunes Store this season. You have 30 days to start watching it, and once you start you have 24 hours to watch and finish it. Movies are all transferable to iPods and iPhones. $2.99 for older titles and $3.99 for new titles. HD is also now available for a buck more.

9:44 AM – Apple TV Take 2 – an upgrade of the current allows movie and TV purchases & rentals from the screen. The YouTube offerings have increased as well (presumably for iPhone owners too). All purchases sync back to your computer. More HD podcasts as well… good news for those of you who jumped on this! Also new: Flickr integration. That’s pretty nice… definite upgrades to a product that was coolly received so far. Existing owners get the new software for free, and new units ship in 2 weeks (with a price drop to $229).

10:08 AM – What we’ve all been waiting for (and by “we” I mean me) – the MacBook Air. Jobs describes it as the world’s thinnest notebook… .16 inches thick at its narrowest point, .75 inches at its thickest (!?!). Fits in a manilla envelope. It has a backlit 13″ LED display (that’s lower power consumption… nice touch). The screen trackpad has multi-touch just like an iPhone too. It can be skinny because it’s using iPod hard drives in it. “Ships with 80GB drive, option of 64GB SSD.” So, not a notebook for storing a ton of stuff, but they didn’t compromise on speed… its got a full Intel Core 2 Duo in there that’s slower than the other MacBooks, but it’s probably because it’s 60% smaller than the ones in the MacBook line.

USB port and a headphone jack on one side, but no internal optical drive. Apple has an interesting new system that allows the MacBook Air to “borrow” an optical drive wirelessly from other Macs on network. External USB drives are available too for the people that need to spin a DVD or CD. 5 hour battery life… this sucker ships in 2 weeks… $1799.

The Eye-Fi wireless SD card sits in your digital camera like any other storage card. However, it also automatically sends your photos via wi-fi to a host of storage sites like Flickr. Yeah, automatically… no syncing, no looking for that USB cable… nothing. I was skeptical when I first heard of this, but apparently it works like a charm.

Blogging will probably continue to be light through the rest of the week – lots of late-in-the-year projects here at Nineball!

Check out the latest addition to the Nineball Media YouTube channel… a Creative Commons use of a Creative Commons primer! For the original comic this was based on, go to the Sharing Creative Works page at creativecommons.org.