NOTE: This is fake!

Today, Apple released the new iPodium. The goal is create an easy way for the camera shy YouTubers to share their life stories via audio. The device plugs into your iPod and allows you to record yourself, make freestyle music, conduct interviews, or digitize meetings and then upload them to iTunes for personal or worldwide distribution to anyone near you using WiFi. Think Napster in your pocket. Apple executives believe that while the success of the iPod has helped them beat other hardware and electronics companies like Microsoft and Sony to the pocket, they believe that their latest innovative creation, the iPodium, will cannibalize their iPod sales by 2010 as written content like blogs, newspapers, and books shift to audio only.

One Apple engineer quotes:
"Every time I put on my iPod in the CalTrain, I realized that I was non-verbally communicating to the people next to me that the musicians' stories and voices were more important to me than their stories. But when you think about phenomena like blogging, Wikipedia, and YouTube it's ultimately about allowing people to share their own stories, not just accessing others."

A Stanford Communications professors said:
"Oftentimes the reason we download a certain song is because it resonates with us, but we rarely consider how many people might resonate with our personal untold stories. Everyone's life story could be a New York Times best seller if we all felt free to be our authentic selves by creating space for one another to share. The person sitting next to me on the train or plane could potentially meet my needs at that moment in a way that the songs on my iPod can't because conversation is a two-way street and fresh, whereas most mass media is one-way and reproduced."

An avid iPod user said:
"Why do I want to connect with a musician that I'll never likely meet rather than the person sitting right next to me?" Wouldn't it be more powerful to give the person next to me a voice by opening my ear to them instead or recognize my own voice by sharing my own story with someone else?"

An Apple executive quotes:
"Just like our I-Pods, our I-Podium is always with us. It's our voice, it's our life, it's our story. Everyone has one. I-Pods allow us to hear other people's stories, but the I-Podium will allow us to share our own stories. As a world, we keep living the same story over and over because we keep listening to the same story over and over. Whatever your medium may be...music, video, writing, speech, painting, etc...make sure that you share as much with the world as you take from it. "

A hip hop artist said:
Hip hop gave me my voice. It was my outlet. It's my political stage...and podium. Everybody needs a way to tell their story to the world. Hip hop is mine. In this world, nobody's voice should be louder than someone else's and nobody should have a monopoly on the people's eyes and ears. It's like my man Nas said "All I need is one mic."