So like its spiritual predecessor Napster, Bittorrent is apparently going to be reborn as a legal download service. While I’m happy to see progress being made in the realm of digital content distribution, I’m a little wary about a Bittorrent based pay-as-you-download service.

Here’s the thing: Bittorrent is a very different animal compared to a server based download services like Apple’s iTunes. Its strength comes from it’s distributed nature, illustrated by fancypants images like this. All those little blue circles feeding your new Harry Potter movie? Those are computers that belong to other users. More importantly, the bandwidth being used to deliver Harry Potter 10: Voldemort in Space is being paid for by those users.

So here’s the big question: will the prices of this movie service be subsidized to compensate for the user’s bandwidth that’s sapped to deliver content on the behalf of the service provider? I gotta assume that’s a big fat “not a chance in hell”.

They say you should “draw what you know”, and apparently Gautam Rao, aka “The Playful Painter” really knows OSX. He’s created a series of unique oil paintings depicting the Macintosh user experience, which have been snapped up by the world through eBay. It’s a really cool idea, I could totally see one of these hanging on an office wall.

In honor of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival this weekend, I thought it appropriate to leave you all with this video. Enjoy the holiday and we’ll see you next week!

The Web 2.0 community continues to wage war on the letter ‘e’ this week with the new personal wishlist creator Wishlistr. The site exudes AJAX goodness from its subtly animated menus to its use of large fonts and beautiful layouts. Once you sign up, you can add a bookmarklet to your browser making the addition of new items a one-click process. Of great interest to me was the ability to import my current wishlist from Amazon. Once you have your wishlist built, you can easily share it with family and friends thanks to Wishlistr’s use of simplified URLs (i.e. http://www.wishlistr.com/justin77). Hint.

The site has just been launched and they are promising many more features to come so keep an eye on it for future developments!