Those of us of a certain age may fondly recall the ritual of going down to the record store to drop eight or nine bucks on the new Billy Idol LP. Along with the actual record, the sleeve itself may have contained hidden treasures: photos of Idol’s trademark sneer, some lyrics so you could sing along to “Eyes Without a Face” or “Flesh For Fantasy”, maybe even some extras, like a note from Billy about how much fun he had recording the album. Of course, all those record-sleeve extras shrunk when CDs becamse the norm, and now with mp3s, they’ve disappeared completely.

But the recording industry, and Apple, are both borrowing ideas from those times of yore in an attempt to help boost online music sales. Depending on who you ask, either Apple, or a conglomeration of record companies, first had the idea to bundle an album’s worth of mp3s along with an assortment of extras. Regardless of who first had the idea, consumers can look forward to two different, but very similar, bundling formats in the coming months.

Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI have taken time away from suing file-swappers, to work together on their new bundling, called CMX. Apple’s similar offering is code-named Cocktail. In both cases, if you buy an album, you’ll get somewhere around 10 songs, then an assortment of extras, from lyrics, to music videos, to photos, and who knows what else. Apple’s offering may be ready as soon as September, just in time to for the launch of a new iPod (maybe), while CMX should be soft-launching in November or so. Why a soft-launch? From early reports, it seems the record companies may be less than confident about how their new brainstorm will be received by consumers. An inside source indicates they’ll start with just a few albums to see how it goes.

Of course, with Apple’s impressive track-record, you have to think that their similar product offering bodes well for the whole idea. If they think it will fly, it will probably fly. And if it does, and gets people excited about actually paying for ten songs at a time, there may be a whole lot of record execs letting out a whole lot of rebel yells in the near future.

So far the big news out of the 2009 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference is all about the iPhone 3.0 software upgrade. A variety of new and cool/useful firmware functionality should plug a bunch of holes in the usability of iPhones as well as provide new opportunities for the companies who create apps.

A lot of the upgrades they’ve announced are smallish, but for anyone who plays and (especially) works on their iPhone, they’ll be welcome additions. Some of the highlights announced so far:

• Push notification system for alerts – Apple decided to build an OS that doesn’t allow the running of background apps, due to concerns about battery life. But with push notification, apps that aren’t turned on can now send you an alert when something needs your attention.
• In-App purchases – This will allow for the monetization of all kinds of apps, which will allow companies to develop cool, expensive applications which they can monetize by encouraging user spending. There’s tons of potential here, though it bodes ill for the wallets of those of us users who are impulsive purchasers.
• Cut-and-Paste  – The inability to do this stuff on iPhones was one of the things people complained about loud and often.
• Spotlight Device Search – Just like on your home computer, you’ll now be able to do a search of your iPhone to locate pictures, emails, songs, contact names, whatever.
• Undo Gesture – Just shake your iPhone and it will undo the last thing you did.
• Bluetooth-based Connectivity Between Devices – Multi-player iPhone gaming anyone?

Those were just a few of the highlights so far. The conference just started a couple hours ago, so there’ll likely be some more new announcements throughout the day and week ahead.

Last week Apple made a rare public relations mis-step, when they banned a stylin’ new e-book reader app because of the Kama Sutra. It seems that the ancient life-and-sex improvement manual was one of the books available for download via the Eucalyptus app, and that made someone over at Apple decide to pull the plug on the whole thing. Of course, it’s all ludicrous as soon as you think about it for the one second it takes to realize that iPhones also come with internet browsers…browsers which, I’m told, a skilled internet user can use to find pictures of nekkid people on the web.

But the blogosphere blogged, the tweetosphere tweeted and the Kama Sutrasphere did whatever they do, and the people made their displeasure known. And yesterday, Apple caved to public pressure and officially rescinded their ban on the “pornographic” e-reader. So now any iPhone user can pay $10 to get Eucalyptus, then download the Kama Sutra for free. What this means for the continuing survival of civilization, only time will tell.

Besides making Apple look like a bunch of puritans who don’t want anyone reading about exotic sex positions, the whole thing does dig up an old and interesting debate. Though many disagree, there are those who argue that porn has had a huge effect on various technologies we use every day. They say that the needs of smut purveyors have been a major factor in a number of technology wins, from VHS winning out over Beta, to DVD kicking Laserdisc to the curb, to Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD. With that in mind it’s sort of funny that the latest little smut/technology skirmish was fought over a sex manual that’s two thousand years old.