Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) ended the day at $76.41, down $1.20 or 1.55% after having a very strong week of gains that made me wonder yesterday if we'd be seeing $80 soon.

Certainly there are a lot of positives, with iPhone mania and scuttlebutt starting up, but Apple is generating some negative buzz with its attack on all things 'pod.' Use the words iPod and podcasting and Apple comes after you. Is this a reasonable attempt to protect trademarks, or is Apple going a bit overboard?

Add to that the fact that Apple is battling its media providers, with one of them yanking content worth 10,000 downloads a day from the iTunes store. It's the Major League Baseball radio podcast that people can download for free, but the reason it was yanked was due to Apple's uncooperative interactions with MLB, something many media companies report being dissatisfied with. Apple needs to mend some of these relationships as it tries to woo large studios to host their movies for download.

Here are two facts for Apple shareholders to think about:

• 23% of Audible.com's sales were generated via the Apple iTunes Music Store.  That's $4.4 million.  Audible's current partnership as Apple's sole provider of spoken word audio to the Apple iTunes Music Store ends in 2007.
• NPR, reports that in the single month of April 6 million podcasts were grabbed from their site, 20 million since the media organization began podcasting last August.

What these two milestones for their respective companies show is just how ubiquitousness the iPod has become in digital media. It is not only a by-product of an emerging technology, but rather a vehicle aiding in driving change and technological evolution -- in this case, via spoken word audio and new media broadcasting alongside front running technologies such as satellite radio (XM, Sirius).

Skype, long the darling of VOIP newbies like me, is nothing if not a bandwagon-jumper. The company, acquired by eBay last September, has never stayed true to its phone calling roots, dabbling in everything from instant messaging to voicemail to videocasting. And we know it: everybody's doing ring tones.

The latest bandwagon, straight from the playbooks of the rest of the phone calling world: music downloads. Today Skype signed agreements with a number of the music biggies, including Warner / Chappell Music, EMI Music Publishing, and Sony / ATV Music Publishing. These agreements will allow Skype to distribute many of its ringtones "lawfully" (was it unlawful before, I wonder?) from artists like Madonna, Depeche Mode, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

So I've got to know: how long before Skype launches a campaign where they play some hip-shaking song from the most commercially over-exposed group on television, the Black-eyed Peas? I predict it won't be long.