This week’s tasty tidbits from the business and technology front, as well as other recommended links:

• Letter from California: The Cobra — Inside a movie marketer’s playbook; the marketing tools Hollywood uses to find (and sometimes trick) its audience.
• Microsoft’s Photosynth, the best thing to happen to photography since the digital camera — Some of the examples included in this article really are pretty remarkable. Photosynth crashed when I tried to install it, but the software’s potential is certainly exciting.
• Say Goodbye to Analog TV — “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” This poetic description at the start of Neuromancer is now obsolete…
• 8 Inspiring Stories Of ASCII Art — A trip down memory lane for those who’ve been a geek since at least the early 90’s.
• Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature — “Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It’s the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing’s remote shores.”
• Get Emails Without Revealing Your Email Address — A free new service called “whspr!” lets you give out a URL that will email you without giving out your email address.
• Macs hit with malware attack — The lack of virus and malware attacks has long been a selling point of Apple’s, but the truth is that Macs only avoided them by virtue of their historically minuscule market share. As Macs get more popular, they become a target…
• 10 Ways to Improve Your Web Page Performance — Good, practical tips for Web developers.
• Nerd Fuel: R2-D2 Water Bottle For Star Wars Sippin’ — You get bonus nerd points if you take a sip and then make loud whirring/whistling/beeping sounds.