In all the fuss over digital vs. paper, cord cutters vs. subscribers, this format vs. that one, two stories crossed my inbox today that showed me, yet again, even in this digital age, the two most important things—quality and availability—remain the same. It doesn't matter what you're selling, in what format, via what technology or medium—quality and availability always come first. Exhibit A: Netflix Turfs Viacom Laura Hazard Owen is one of many who reported about Netflix declining to renew their contract with Viacom. The fallout? Millions of unhappy parents whose children enjoyed streaming episodes of Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants. Amidst...

Dan linked to a great article in today's Morning Links roundup about 'digital mooches,' aka the 20-somethings who may be leaving Mom and Dad's house in the coming years, yet seem to have no plans to leave their parents' cell phone contracts or Netflix subscriptions. I read this article with interest; I'd just read another about 'cord cutters,' aka the cable-free, and how the content industry is wringing their hands about what to do with these people. It seems these articles, read together, paint an ominous pattern: The kids aren't paying because they get it for 'free' at home. Then they turn...

Fresh off the heels of CES and the Polaroid Kids Tablet and the iThis and the iThat, I have a confession to make about technology in education. And here it is: We actually don't need any more technology. We don't, really! That might be a strange thing to say in this age of tech abundance, but the truth is, what we need right now is better content, not better gizmos to run them on. Let's do a roundup of the gadgets currently on hand in my school: Computer Lab This gets used—a lot—by teachers doing their prep. The older grades do have allotted...

The Internet has a love-hate relationship with advertising. Many users of the web consider web ads obnoxious. Many publishers of content on the web consider them vital. And as a result, there’s been an arms race between ad purveyors and ad blockers for as long as ads have been around, despite content publishers’ insistence that the lost revenue could cripple them. The latest shot fired in the war is a Kickstarter project for a device called AdTrap, Intended to retail for $150, available for $120 to early kickers, the AdTrap is a little open-source box with two Ethernet ports...

On GigaOm, Mathew Ingram posits that the traditional structure of the news article may not be ideally serving today’s readers. Some articles discussing current events may be loaded with terminology that some readers can’t understand—but adding background would waste space from the point of those who know the subject well. In the current on-line era, of course, there are plenty of external sources of information that could be linked—such as Wikipedia, if nothing else—but many papers don’t bother with that sort of linking, and if they did link would rather link internally to their own sources in order to...

Here’s another of those “the print ship is sinking, hurry up and get off it” posts you see every so often, this one a guest post on TechCrunch by Jordan Kurzweil, co-CEO of digital business agency Independent Content. Kurzweil starts by recommending that newspapers “face reality”: - The audiences of traditional print brands on paper and pixel are aging. - Digital upstarts are capturing the new audiences, and stealing your least loyal current readers. - The cost structures of Old Print companies are out of whack with the times....

Sam Harris has posted a rather provocative entry to his blog discussing the problem faced by writers in an era when audiences “increasingly expect digital content to be free” and have such short attention spans that increasingly full-length books are seeming just too long. It’s a topsy-turvy world, Harris posits, when people with popular blogs get so many hits that publishing it in even a famous and well-regarded magazine like Vanity Fair is “tantamount to burying their work” by comparison. He cites as example an article by his friend Christopher Hitchens, whose numbers of Facebook likes and Twitter...

On PaidContent, Charles Arthur brings up one of the important facets of Steve Jobs’s legacy that tends to get overshadowed by Jobs’s hardware successes. Quite apart from all the gadgets Jobs designed, he also designed a new business model for the music industry: the 99-cent song. The headline of Arthur’s article suggests that Jobs’s great success was “persuading the world to pay for content,” but the article itself seems to take the opposite tack: the world was ready to pay for content, but Jobs’s success was in persuading the content-owners to sell it digitally. Arthur explains that...

Edward Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives has a summary of events at Brazil’s second digital book conference. There is some interesting stuff there, including the contention of SocialBook founder Bob Stein that Brazil has the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of far-too-conservative American publishers who “blew it” when it came to meeting the e-book challenge. But something I find more interesting in this case is Nawotka’s “discussion seed” post, that brings up a point raised at the conference that wasn’t even reflected in the main article. One panelist noted that piracy proves, at the very...

Reader’s Digest, one of the original “content aggregators,” is working on revamping itself digitally. Long before the web even existed, Readers Digest was republishing content from other magazines, bundled together in a form that would give subscribers access to a wide variety of interesting content. The magazine was apparently hit hard by the digital age—it just emerged from bankruptcy last year—but has been making a comeback; it is currently the bestselling magazine in the Kindle Store, and has released three apps this year. And it just hired Matthew Goldenberg, former managing editor and operations director for Bloomberg, to be the general...

At Techdirt, Mike Masnick has an interesting piece looking at the dynamics of Groupon, and how they’re able to keep ahead of competitors. You would think that there’s nothing particularly special about a coupon site, but Groupon manages to stay ahead of the competition through its execution—most notably, the snappy, humorous copy it comes up with to promote even the most prosaic of deals. As a final aside, the quality of Groupon's content highlights another key point that we've raised many times before: how "infinite goods" like content make scarce goods more valuable. In this case,...

Readability disabled its old bookmarklet this afternoon, redirecting the script reference to its new browser applet instead. Rationally, I can see why they would have to do it—if they’re wanting to track pages viewed for the purpose of doling out content payments, they have to channel them through a source that can actually track those views. But I’m finding that the new applet is considerably less satisfactory than the old bookmarklet for a number of reasons. The old bookmarklet seemed to do its actual processing on my own computer. This provided a faster response time, and it also...