Art of the day

The Sitayana by Nina Paley

Fascinating piece of animation art. The ancient Indian epic Ramayana from a feminist viewpoint, fusion with old American jazz...has it all.

Humour of the day

The Onion | Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory (via BoingBoing)

The Indian Economy

I've been following this excellent blog to keep up with the views of some very fine commenters on Indian economy. Pretty interesting stuff. I had no idea that India is second only to the US in filing pharma patents or that the rupee was undervalued on the Big Mac index. Recommended reading.

PetroKazakhstan got takeover bids from PetroChina, India's ONGC

Another move in the global game of chess to capture energy resources.

DRM vs Plasticity

Redux:

"...They won't buy music that's tied to a specific device or has onerous limitations on what they can do with it -- which will probably rule out any carrier's download store from being a success."

Blah, blah, you know the story (see my media ppt if you don't), but may be worth reminding yourself that plays which enable plasticity will create huge amounts of value, largely by building demand-side scope economies, and so hugely raising switching costs to competing Media 2.0 platforms (ie, it's more economical for you to reuse the same track across phone/MP3/laptop/etc than otherwise).

The caveat is, I guess, as long as you don't go in guns blazing and cause a nice backlash (viz Google Print).

Peer Production Goes Physical

Etsy is a nice example of peer production moving slowly into the physical. It's a site which essentially enables a Long Tail in handicrafts - a low-value physical domain (vs media; a high-value digital domain).

This is in line with what my general thesis, which is peer production moving slowly from digital, now that it's exhausting the highest-value segments there, to physical - again, moving from low to higher and higher value domains.

Smart players (viz KP and Zazzle) have been tracking this trend for a while, and have already placed their bets. For example, Zazzle shifts physical peer production decisively into higher value domains by leveraging existing brands.

But, for the most part, the usual suspects continue to be more than a little suspicious of peer production from a monetization standpoint, despite the growing wealth of data (SecondLife, Habbo Hotel stats, Wikipedia traffic) - which leaves a nice market gap for smart entrepreneurs to prove them wrong, and get acquired.