So last night I’m flying back to NYC from The Medici Summit, a conference in Arizona (which was excellent – looking forward to next year already) where I did a keynote speech to some folks from Nike, IBM, Disney and several other companies about how they could benefit from piracy by acting like pirates themselves, as opposed to throwing lawsuits at them.

On the flight home, my left eyeball began to get irritated, something to do with a dodgy contact lens I think. My eye was still hurting when I woke up this this morning so I went to the doctors office. The doc told me that I somehow managed to scratch the surface of my eye. It’s going to be fine, but she gave me some eyedrops, and then told me I have to wear a patch for the next few days.

Live by the sword, die by the sword…

“Hello from Nine Inch Nails.

“We’re very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV. Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

“Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

Get the full skinny here.

There’s a great article over on Salon by Jeff Yang, who asks the questions: Which brands best represent the American presidential candidates? And which of these brands will best represent America? The answers from those in the advertising industry are fascinating. Yang writes:

“There’s no way to put this delicately, so I won’t: America’s global image is in the crapper. Last year, the BBC World Service conducted a poll of over 26,000 individuals in the world’s 25 largest countries and found that more than 52 percent thought the U.S. had a “mostly negative” influence on the world. Fifty-three percent of respondents to a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs felt America could “not be trusted.”

“Which means that, on top of everything else it represents, the current presidential election is something like an ad agency review — a chance to put a set of potential stewards for “Brand America” through their paces, to see the creative and strategic directions in which they’d take our product. “

Get the rest here.