This just isn't the same. Actually, I'm using that story on the Bollywood Hari Puttar as a cheap excuse to berate the current teen bestseller list. Let's see, the Twilight series promotes ultra traditional values: meek girls should settle down with manly vampires. And the latest in the Inheritance series, Brisingr, which I'm about a quarter of the way through, has "graduated" from a home-schooled teenager's Deep Insights on responsibility and identity to scarily S&M-colored self-actualization.

Harry Potter might have been a thinly-disguised English public school jock with geek friends and gay teachers, but at least he was concerned with balancing friendship, teamwork, & individual responsibility while battling evil. Boy, I miss Brit kid lit.

For some reason, people were writing about SanDisk's slotMusic -- a plan to distribute record albums (remember them?) via DRM-free MP3s on microSD cards. (Aspiring pundits should probably avoid publicly reminding readers they've forgotten the past.)

Here's what physical distribution of media was supposed to do in the 20th century:

- Enforce DRM & release windows
- Facilitate retail
- Force consumers to regularly upgrade
- Create a reasonably cost-effective value proposition for consumers with margins for retail and rights owners

DRM is dead. So here's what physical distribution of media needs to do in the 21st:

- Save brick & mortar retail. Oops, too late
- Act as a back-up; slotMusic defeats the purpose if its pitch is a re-usable medium
- Create a reasonably cost-effective value proposition for consumers with margins for retail and rights owners. We haven't seen pricing yet, so who knows?

Yahoo's rolling out a beta version to random users of its redesigned homepage, the single most valuable piece of real estate on the Web. (At least until Google puts ads on the front page.) When Jupiter was briefed about the strategy a month and a half ago, we talked about a couple things:

- Yahoo has a notion about Internet starting points or "front doors." In investor presos, it calls the homepage, MyYahoo, Mail, Search, and Mobile as those starting points. But in our more fine-grained discussion, UPDATED: we talked about the homepage, MyYahoo, the toolbar, and Yahoo Buzz are the near-term focus points.

- I asked explicitly about Mail (which opens with a news/content pane, two tickers, a Web search bar, a rich media ad unit and six other ad/promotion/text ad units). I got the feeling that Yahoo is re-thinking what kind of a starting point role mail should play, and that its current content launchpad role might not be the way to go.

- Yahoo's always been correctly cautious about changing the homepage, and about integrating customization/personalization there. It can't risk alienating or disorienting its homepage users, and it's never gotten MyYahoo usage above 10-15%. (No one else has done better; widgets on social networks are the most promising customization technique we've seen.) Yahoo's strategy to teach its mainstream users to customize the homepage feels like it will leverage Buzz as a promotional vehicle.

File this under "End of Era." MTV is ending Total Request Live, one of the originators of "illusionary programming" (what Jupiter called entertainment where you fooled the audience it was in control, ie off-line UGC).