When will the music industry do it right? “That big bad boogieman of piracy is blowing down everyone’s house. The poor music industry. Except of course that there is nothing more than anecdotal proof that Peer to Peer networks hurt music sales, and to counter those, there are studies and anecdotal evidence that the sampling opportunity that P2P networks create actually help sales.”

to the early days of the Wesley Clark campaign: Presidential Campaign Graphic Identities. In particular, it’s interesting that no one was in charge of the file when Cam got to Little Rock. The political consultant in me would think that’s the first thing you have to have – an in-house person who can stickhandle all of the basic stuff – design, printing, distribution. All that stuff that you need to win but can’t waste time at the top doing.

features an excellent article called The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the mag’s current editor. In the article Anderson very clearly describes a phenomenon that a lot of people have come at in different ways, but does so very succinctly and ties together the facts with the implications. Basically, Anderson suggests, product popularity can be graphed as a power law curve, but notes that at the “less-popular” end it takes a long time to cross zero. Adding all of those low-selling items together, then, adds up to a great deal of potential sales, and once distribution costs are mitigated – they would be prohibitive on the volume of any one iteam at that end of the curve – you are left with huge numbers. It’s an important article, highly recommended.

in the US have won a victory as the Supreme Court has decided it won’t hear Do Not Call case. Telemarketers have been trying to invoke First Amendment rights to have the lists quashed.

interview with James Wolcott: Man bites lap dogs! Wolcott currently writes for Vanity Fair but was a long-time critic at the Village Voice. And he’s now become a blogger as well.