From yesterday’s Cir­cuits sec­tion of the NY Times, David Pogue looks at the wacky game of Design That Busi­ness Model! in the enter­tain­ment industry.

To nobody’s sur­prise except the music com­pa­nies’, Apple sold 13 mil­lion songs in six months — 70 per­cent of all online music sales — even though the ser­vice worked only on Macs.

In the Books sec­tion of Sunday’s NY Times, Max Frankel reviewed Wes­ley Clark’s Win­ning Mod­ern Wars.

Just came across (via David Roth­man) this thought­ful, expan­sive look at dig­i­tal rights issues from John Walker, founder of Autodesk: The Dig­i­tal Impri­matur. How big brother and big media can put the Inter­net genie back in the bottle.

From David H. Rothman’s Tel­eRead: Boucher attacks Copy­right Office rul­ing on DMCA.

Paul Eng in ABCNews.com’s Future Tech writes about RSS enter­ing the main­stream: “Now, some savvy online enthu­si­asts and Web oper­a­tors are turn­ing to an obscure, but fast-rising tech­nol­ogy called Rich Site Sum­mary, or RSS.” Excerpt:

“Right now, it’s used for news,” says con­sul­tant Amy Gahran. “But sports teams can use it to pub­lish sta­tis­tics, music groups can use it to pub­lish tour dates, gov­ern­ment agen­cies can use it to pub­lish reg­u­la­tory updates. There are a lot of poten­tial uses for RSS that have yet to be tapped.”

Thanks to E-Media Tid­bits for the pointer.

Howard Rhein­gold in In These Times: It has taken 10 years of talk about “new media” for a crit­i­cal mass to under­stand that every com­puter desk­top, and now every pocket, is a world­wide print­ing press, broad­cast­ing sta­tion, place of assem­bly, and orga­niz­ing tool–and to learn how to use that infra­struc­ture to [e]ffect change.

Money sen­tence:

For “we jour­nal­ism” to have long-term cred­i­bil­ity and last­ing impact, pro­gres­sives must fund, staff and pro­mote media literacy–teaching users to cre­ate and con­sume this new journalism.

Salon has an engag­ing look at the Atkins diet: Geeks who go low-carb see it as more than just tak­ing off pounds — they’re reengi­neer­ing the human organ­ism, over­clock­ing their own bod­ies. Among those inter­viewed: Cory Doc­torow (who lost 75 pounds), Mike God­win (80 pounds), Doc Searls (25) and  Dave Sifry.

Larry Lessig in the new issue of Wired mag: The blog may be the first inno­va­tion from the Inter­net to make a real dif­fer­ence in elec­tion politics.

Larry nails it. Excerpt:

When done right, as the Howard Dean cam­paign appar­ently is doing, the blog is a tool for build­ing com­mu­nity. The trick is to turn the audi­ence into the speaker. A well-structured blog inspires both read­ing and writ­ing. And by get­ting the audi­ence to type, can­di­dates get the audi­ence com­mit­ted. Engage­ment replaces recep­tion, which in turn leads to real space action. The life of the Dean cam­paign on the Inter­net is not really life on the Inter­net. It’s the activ­ity in real space that the Inter­net inspires. …

This is just what tra­di­tional pol­i­tics would never allow. As Trippi explained, “This is my sev­enth pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. In all of them, every­thing I learned was that you’re sup­posed to have strong mil­i­tary com­mand over every­thing in the orga­ni­za­tion. You give com­mands to your state direc­tors, who give it to the county direc­tors, who order the precinct cap­tains around.”

Wired News reports on the BBC’s iCan exper­i­ment that Dan Gill­mor reported on last week. iCan is a site for cit­i­zens to get the gov­ern­ment to fill in pot­holes and build side­walks, among other things. Is this the com­ing of e-democracy?

ICan works like this: If sub­ur­ban Brits are fed up with their neighborhood’s lack of park­ing, they can post their griev­ance and pro­posed solu­tion on iCan. Neigh­bors can chat and vote on it, make arrange­ments to meet at the local pub, and use iCan’s cam­paign tools to con­tact their MP (mem­ber of parliament).

Slate: Rumsfeld’s Folly. How the war in Iraq under­mined the war on terror.

The Bush admin­is­tra­tion chose its moment of oppor­tu­nity for con­fronting Iraq, not rad­i­cal Islam and ter­ror. So now we are stuck with an Iraq pol­icy, not a for­eign pol­icy for deal­ing with a global challenge–and for a hun­dred well-known rea­sons, we can­not afford to let Iraq fail. Rums­feld asks in his memo whether we are now in a sit­u­a­tion in the war on ter­ror in which “the harder we work, the behin­der we get?”

The answer is yes.