Erwin Ephron says TV isn’t show business, it’s an overloaded message delivery system, and that the future lies in live TV. Maybe he’s right. After all, where else are you going to be able to see Janet Jackson’s tit?

(You need to register to see articles in Ephron’s archive, but it’s worth it.)

Cory Doctorow sees right to the heart of Bill Gates’ remarks about Google:

This was by far the most interesting thing I’ve read about Google in 2004: the value proposition is in the 20 percent that represents the least-frequent queries in the service. It’s the same reason that PirateNapster, with millions of songs (most of which you didn’t care about) was a million times better than LegitNapster, with a few hundred thousand songs, most of which you can hear by turning on the radio. It’s the difference between an ASCII ebook that you can print of turn into a PDF or run through text-to-speech or any of a million tasks that most of us don’t care about and a frozen ebook in a DRM format that you can only use in the ways that the publisher’s research has indicated are most popular.