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).