• Be Jackson Pollock for a day (or a few minutes). Be sure to click to change the colors. (via Feld Thoughts)
• In a rather popular question for the day: How many sources of income do you personally have? As a former market research person, this is a great question, but it needs to be a little more specific: Excluding the revenue sources of other people in your household, how many sources of income do you have? (Joint streams, such a project that you & another work on together, count.) Then, the number split needs to be 1, 2, 3-5, 5+ to reflect people who have a full-time job, a full-time job plus perhaps some freelancing, and people who are putting multiple streams together. I’d make the argument though that this still isn’t the world’s best poll. If I had 5 streams of income, that doesn’t amount to much if they’re each $200; I could just as easily have 1 stream of income that’s $100k a year. Additionally, it could cost me $100 to have an income stream that only generates $50. A smart researcher would find out how much each of those streams deliver profit-wise.

• Poll of the readers of Infectious Greed. Of the 160 responses so far, 44% have 2-3.
• Poll of the readers of Lifehacker. Of the 459 responses so far, well over 50% have 2 or more sources.

What are you implying, John? That O’Reilly & Geraldo are narcissists enthralled with their own overblown egos, projecting their own petty insecurities onto the world around them? inventing false enemies for the sole purpose of bolstering their sense of self-importance, itty bitty Nixons minus the relevance or a hint of vision? How dare you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uyhzw2kcSSs

Miscellaneous things I have marked for reading later:

• How to think like Warren Buffett, the 29-part series. How relevant investing advice from 1978 is I don’t know, but they’re all fairly short with good quotes from the shareholder letters of Berkshire Hathaway. (via Lifehacker)
• Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts. I got a MacBook recently and keep accidentally deleting things with my ingrained Windows shortcuts. (again, via Lifehacker)
• Managing around interruptions. While I’m fairly organized on the papers side, I get interrupted a lot, especially when I’m trying to, say, write a 2100-word article due next week or a marketing plan. I started coming into work an hour before everyone else, just for an hour of quiet time. 
• Sirena Huang on TEDTalks. I find the TEDTalks blog a little frustrating in that I can’t always download the mp3s and I’ve not yet figured out why.
• Into the Mountains of Kyrgyzstan. I’ve fallen way behind on the Frugal Traveller column on the NYTimes. Between the column, a friend who gets to travel a great deal for work, and some recent reading, it’s just making me want to get my passport, quit my job, and go.

Rob Walker wrote a follow-up post after receiving feedback on the recent Brand Underground article. I didn’t think he was either too adulatory or too critcial. He does, however, have the opportunity to go a lot farther with this topic than 3 20-something skaters/cool guys making t-shirts and schlepping them out to retailers nationwide. Every subculture and cunterculture and counter-subculture has its icons and its cool guys and all of them have attempted monetization/commercialization/productization to varying degrees of success. I suppose depth was a better choice for the piece than breadth, but I’m pretty sure there’s enough room in a book for a few more examples than streetwear.

• How to Create a Meme
• Nicholas Negroponte on the One Laptop Per Child Project. Nigeria recently committed to buying 1 million of the laptops, while India rejected the project.
• Seattle is becoming the home to gourmet/indie sodas.

In an excellent NY Times Magazine article called “The Brand Underground”, columnist Rob Walker expounds on the nature of the indie brand, the identity of those who’ve taken to heart the phrase “Commodify Your Dissent” (though his take on it is “commodify your indifference”):

Corporate branding is a function of the profit motive: companies have stuff to sell and hire experts to create the most compelling set of meanings to achieve that goal. A keen awareness of and cynicism toward this core fact of commercial persuasion — and the absurd lengths that corporations will go to in the effort to infuse their goods with, say, rebelliousness or youthful cool — is precisely the thing that is supposed to define the modern consumer. We all know that corporate branding is fundamentally a hustle. And guys like A-Ron are supposed to know that better than anybody.

Which is why the supposed counterculture nature of his brand might arouse some suspicion. Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?

It’s not just those involved in skater or street culture, who are the primary targets for the article. Bloggers, podcasters, MySpace people are also trying to figure out how to turn themselves and their lifestyle into a product that generates revenue, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Update: As a counterpoint, Scott Puckett’s article “How Much Did You Pay for Your Identity: The Big Business of Selling Identity to Kids”.

• Short National Geographic video on the rise of Cuban hip-hop.
• Wikipedia entry on the subject
• Seattle Weekly article on the origin of Cuban hip-hop
• CD releases: Cuban Hip-Hop All-Stars, Vol 1