Let me try out a theory on you. Not sure if it makes any sense, I'm one of those people that needs to write what I think, (and then discuss it with you), in order to get things straight in my head. And this NYTimes paywall thing is really bugging me.
Physical things that exist as single-use conduits of information (paper books, paper newspapers, paper magazines) and physical places that are containers or platforms for information delivery (college campuses, bookstores) will in persist, and even thrive. However, for these physical conduits and containers to survive, they will either need to move far up-market, or way down-market.

Books made of paper will need to be either really beautiful and offer a superior tactile experience, or they will need to be very cheaply produced on thin paper and be basically disposable. I'll be less price sensitive to a paper copy of the NYTimes or a magazine if real attention is paid to the quality of the design, layout, paper, and printing. Or I'll pick-up a free paper newspaper that I may or may not read, and will skimmed and thrown away.

What I will not buy is any one-time conduit of information (book, magazine, newspaper) that is somewhere in the middle. Too expensive to easily throw away, but too cheaply made to want to keep in my collection. Everything else, everything between the very low-end and very high-end product, will be delivered digitally.

The "big middle" of information delivery will move to digital, online delivery.

On the higher ed side, I think the connection is with how our campuses will look. We will in fact see an acceleration of amenities on residential, high tuition, campuses. Fancy classrooms, athletic facilities, libraries, dorms and food-service operations will get fancier. On the other end, lower-tuition institutions will become more spartan (in order to lower tuition even more), with most of these amenities outsourced moved to variable pricing schemes, with students paying per use. Physical campuses will continue to exist because it costs less money to provide a good, low-amenity (unbundled) education than a comparable learning experience online.

The "big middle" of higher ed will move to digital, online delivery.

If this theory is correct, when evaluating digital pricing we should first be asking: "Does the digital price fall somewhere in between the high price for a luxury physical good and the near zero price for a disposable or no-frills physical good?". The digital experience needs to be superior to that which can be had with a low-end physical experience, but not as good as what can be enjoyed with a high-end physical purchase.

This theory also suggest that, over time, most information services will migrate to digital, as the "middle" experience will be the most numerically common good. As the digital middle grows, the physical middle will be pushed further out on each quality tail.

What do you think? I know that this thinking is completely incomplete, what I want to know is where this thinking is wrong.

Towards the end of Steve Dublanica's hilarious and information filled Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper's Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity, the author provides a list of people known as "bad tippers". To my chagrin, both academics and information technology workers made the list. Does this mean that academic technology are the worst tippers on the planet?

One thing that I am sure of after reading "Keep the Change" is that all of us should become much better at tipping. Some of the surprises for me in the book are how many people depend mostly on tips to make a living. Everyone from cab drivers to furniture delivery people to hair stylists depend largely on tips to make ends meet. I had always known that restaurant people (waiters, bartenders etc.) work mostly for tips, but I had not realized that bathroom attendants, shoe shine workers, and the people at the car wash also rely on tips to such a large degree.

My biggest tipping inadequacy, one that I pledge to correct, is how I tip the people who clean hotel rooms. I've always left a twenty at the end of my stay. Turns out that hotel cleaning people in large hotels, the same hotels that we stay in during academic tech conferences, are often randomly assigned to a new room each day. So if you leave a tip at the end of your stay the person who cleaned your room each day might not get any money. What we should be doing is leaving a daily tip, and putting it in an envelope. And the open bar at the ed tech vendor sponsored events - tip the bartender. (On that note…bartender tips are 20% of the drink cost, not a dollar per drink).

We first met Steve Dublanica in Waiter Rant, and if you enjoyed that book (I did), and are interested in the sociology and economics of service occupations, then you will enjoy 'Keep the Change'.

What are your tipping questions? Are you a big tipper?

What are you reading?

When will you pay for digital content? If you are in the information business, and education is an information business, it probably makes sense to spend some time thinking about this question.

I just answered that question for myself, giving Audible (really Amazon), $229.50 of my money in exchange for 25 audiobook credits (works out to $9.18 a book).

So I'm willing to give Amazon (Audible) $229.50 for the right to download some bytes, yet I'm unwilling to give the NYTimes $240 a year for iPad and Web access? Is this inconsistent?

In thinking about why we are willing to pay for some digital content, and not other, I've come to the conclusion that we need some better digital content economic theory to help both explain and predict our choices. We all have opinions about whether or not the NYTimes paywall makes sense, how much a an e-book from Amazon or B&N should cost, and how much we should pay to rent movies from Netflix or iTunes. What is missing, I think, is a rigorous theoretical framework in which we can evaluate and test our opinions.

Actually, I'm sure that this literature exists. But the digital economics literature has not yet been popularized. I think we about have enough books on behavioral economics (everything from Blunder to Nudge to Predictably Irrational to Sway - I hope Kahneman and Tversky get a royalty for every time they are cited), what is is missing are concise, well-written books on digital economics.

Can anyone point us to some good books and articles on the economics of digital content?

I am lame at Twitter.

The Twitter EDU world is divided into (at least) 3 categories:

Awesome Twitter People: People like Eric Stoller (see below) who authentically leverage Twitter as a new medium for communication, collaboration, and community.

Lame Twitter People: Folks like me. We use the tool badly, don't take advantage of Twitter's ability to forge new connections and provide real time intelligence and analysis, and basically violate and subvert the cultural norms of the platform.

Non-Twitter People: Twitter is just not your thing. You don't Tweet, read Tweets, etc. etc.

The best Twitter person I know is fellow BlogU contributor Eric Stoller @EricStoller (16,931 Tweets, 1,181 Following, 3,698 Followers).

Evidence That I Am Lame At Twitter:

Following/Follow Ration: I am following 1,760 people, but only have 1,002 followers. I don't know what proportion of the people who follow me are happy to get a link with a new IHE Technology and Learning post (I'm hoping many of them!). I suspect I have many of my 1,002 followers largely due to the social norms of following back.

Bad Tweeting: I've Tweeted 627 times, but almost all of these are bit.ly links to one of my blog posts. Each morning I share my IHE post through bit.ly, sending the shared link automatically to Facebook also (which is also the only time I post to Facebook.

Lame Reading: When I started out on Twitter I really enjoyed reading the Tweets. But then I fell into the trap of using Twitter as a promotion tool for this blog, started to collect followers, and before I knew it I had way too many Tweets to read. So I gave up.

I'd like to get better at Twitter. From what I can see from the Awesome Twitter People, Twitter is a powerful (even transformational) tool. I'll never be able to incorporate the flow of information that Eric can deal with, and my fingers are too fat I'm afraid to Tweet while mobile, but I'd like to at least bring back Twitter as an information channel and platform to connect with other learning and tech people.

But I need a new technology. I need a Smart Twitter Filter. Does a Smart Twitter Filter exist? Seems like some company is going to make lots of money on this. A Smart Twitter Filter would do 5 things:

1) Prioritize: Tweets I want to read would end up on top. Maybe we would have train the system, going through a couple of days of the Twitter stream amongst our followers until the system figures out what we like to click on. Or maybe it is smarter and prioritizes Tweets from people in my LinkedIn network, or Facebook network, or from folks that I've linked to in my blog or have linked to what I've written.

2) Filter: Tweets that I'll never click on get filtered out. Commercial Tweets and advertisements. Repetitive Tweets. Tweets that don't have anything to do with ed tech (if I set the Filter that way).

3) Meter: The system has to be smart enough to only send me the number of Tweets that I can deal with. This would be different for everyone, and may change over time, but a smart system will limit my options so I'm more likely to choose to read smoothing.

4) Learn: The Smart Twitter Filter will learn from my behavior, and constantly adjust its algorithms to improve the order and content of the Tweets that it shows.

5) Socialize: A Smart Twitter Filter will serve the goal of connecting me with my ed tech community. People I know, and people I should know.

Many people will hate a Twitter filter, even a smart one. They can do all this on their own. They can curate their "Following" list, and use existing platforms to organize their Tweet streams. I started using Seesmic when I first started getting into Twitter and it seems pretty great. Maybe I'm just using the existing tools badly. Can someone help?

Oh...my Twitter thingy is @joshmkim

Where do you fall on the Twitter spectrum?

Would Unfamiliar Fishes be assigned to read in a history course?

Would Sarah Vowell by hired as a history professor?

Probably no on both counts, and that makes me a little sad.

Sarah Vowell writes great history books. Unfamiliar Fishes traces the long-term results for the Hawaiian people, and monarchy, of the decision of a few New England evangelists to move to the archipelago in the early 19th century. The end results, including the loss of sovereignty and the eventual annexation by the U.S. may be predictable - but few of us (certainly not myself), know the details of the story. Sarah Vowell, as always, is the perfect person to teach us some history.

Don't get me wrong. Sarah Vowell doesn't really need academia. She is doing just fine on her own. But we need Sarah Vowell, or at least more people like her. Scholars who perhaps do not take themselves so seriously, but can still manage to draw on primary sources to tell new stories.

I imagine Sarah Vowell's lack of terminal credentials, in addition to the first person narrative and frequent insertions of hilarious personal details into her historical narratives, would somewhat disqualify her from the professional historian club.

Our loss.

Any other Sarah Vowell fans out there?

What are you reading?

I read somewhere a few years ago (maybe in Pink's Free Agent Nation, maybe somewhere else), that many jobs would soon resemble movie industry jobs. None of us would work for a single employer. Just as the studio system is dead in Hollywood (except perhaps at Disney), the time when actors and directors worked for a salary and made the movies the studio bosses chose, soon the "salary model" would also be a memory.

"Talent" from different disciplines would come together to work on projects, get paid for the gig, and disperse once the job was done. Some teams might move from project to project, and the free market for talent would both raise wages and productivity. The Web would grease the wheels, lowering transaction and search costs, and serving as the medium (and often the product) of much of this work.

This future never quite arrived. How many of us are incoming packaging from multiple sources, jumping from project to project, team to team? Or more to the point, how many of our projects are completed by free agents? Perhaps it is because the world is broken down into services and projects, and much of our time is spent on delivering these (critical) existing services. Services do not conform to the movie business model of production. The studio system, at least in my world of academic tech, seems to be entrenched.

But lately I've been wondering if we are seeing signs of a change? Ed tech and teaching/learning creative types seem to be spending less time in any given job. People seem to be moving from one project to another. Institution to institution. Ed tech company to ed tech company. Publisher to publisher. Some are indeed becoming free agents. Consultants and free-lancers.

What is going on? Some guesses:

Not A Real Trend 1 - An Illusion: Perhaps the flex and fluidity that I think I'm seeing is an artifact, a false positive, a series of random events that I'm falsely putting into a pattern. People are not changing jobs or employers or locales or ways of working any more frequently than 2 or 5 or 10 years ago, and it is a mistake to generalize from what I think I'm witnessing.

Not A Real Trend 2 - A Cohort Effect: Could be that I am indeed seeing people change jobs, employers, titles, institutions, and cities more frequently - but the overall rates of employment change are staying consistent? Maybe what I'm seeing has more to do with where I am in my career than any change in the overall structure of ed tech employment.

A Real Trend 1 - Growth of Opportunities: But, perhaps something is going on. Maybe we are seeing some maturation of the ed tech space, and a growth in opportunities and needs across schools and companies. Ed tech is essential to both save dollars and create opportunities for new dollars. If your school or company or non-profits is part of the higher ed world, and don't have a project underway that somehow involves technology, you probably will not be around all that much longer.

A Real Trend 2 - Growth of Networks: The 2nd reason why I think that this trend might be real is the Web has made it much easier for the people in our community to connect and collaborate. We work with people at other institutions, know what is going on at other companies, and hear about opportunities that might have been hidden in the past. The ed tech community is truly a very small one. At some point we start to know the players, and these networks lead to job offers and new projects.

What do you think?

Have you changed jobs or switched your model of working lately?

Are you now income packaging, freelancing, or consulting?

Are you going Hollywood?

People who work with information, folks like you and me, are constantly in danger of becoming obsessed with jobs that involve working with things. The reason I love chef books is that the job seems so tangible. You work with your hands and your brain to create something, a product that can be tasted.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton, is not the typical chef, restaurant or food book. With Hamilton, food is always a metaphor for relationships (usually screwed up).

If you are like me, you probably started with Kitchen Confidential, maybe moved on to Heat, took a detour with Waiter Rant, and now too often find yourself absorbed in food porn on the Food Network.

I'll most likely never eat at Hamilton's NYC restaurant, Prune (her childhood nickname from a now estranged mother). Prune's food sounds delicious, the anti-foodie culture refreshing, but I doubt I'm hip enough or knowledgeable enough about food to appreciate her cooking.

Reading Blood, Bones & Butter is as close as I'll get to Hamilton's cooking, and the sensual experience that I imagine Prune provides. This is a book about how a person with deep relationship issues, issues with roots is a dysfunctional and then broken family, can simultaneously succeed gloriously (in both cooking/restauranteering and writing), and fail spectacularly (at creating a marriage). Hamilton is ballsy enough to provide us something of an unvarnished glimpse into the most brutal and ugly aspects of dining out (particularly catering food), and marriage.

Blood, Bones & Butter will be polarizing. Some readers will love it (I did), some will find Hamilton so unappealing as a personality that the book will leave a bad aftertaste. Some people will feel both at once. Whatever the verdict, I think everyone will agree that Hamilton can flat-out write.

Read Blood, Bones & Butter, and tell us how it goes down for you.

What are you reading?

Jeff Bezos loves the NYTimes paywall.

Here is what Amazon will do:

1. Create the Amazon Book Review Section:

Starting March 28th, the NYTimes Book Review will loose some of its power to drive (or destroy) new book sales. This is an opportunity for Amazon. Today I go to the Book section of the NYTimes to decide if I should invest my time and money in a new book (which I will then purchase as an audiobook from Amazon's Audible site, an e-book from Amazon for the Kindle, or a paper book). Come March 28th, where will I go?

Amazon will meet this need by taking the very simple step of paying really smart people to write really good book reviews, book reviews that will be as carefully edited at those that appear in the Times. Amazon will need to hire some good editors, and reasonable fees to attract good reviewers, but otherwise starting the Amazon Book Review Section will not be all that expensive. The book reviews will be unbiased, containing both raves and pans, they will be as trusted and authoritative as those found on the NYTimes. But there will be more reviews, and they will appear more frequently.

There is a long tail of people qualified and motivated to review books, and by leveraging the database of existing user reviews on the site the editors of the Amazon Book Review will be able to identify new reviewers to approach. Perhaps the Amazon Book Review Section will create space for a set of book reviewing bloggers, and host these blogs off the main Amazon Book Review site.

2. Offer the Amazon Book Review as a Free Kindle and Audible Publication:

The Amazon Book Review Section will of course live on Amazon.com, but will also be packaged into a free Kindle e-publication and Audible audio publication. The Kindle version will come out each week, or maybe be continuously updated anytime someone synched their Kindle. Perhaps specialized Kindle book reviews will be created, for fiction, non-fiction, kids books, mysteries, whatever.

The audio version will contain reviews read by the reviewers, who will get training in how to read a review out loud. The audio version will be available on Audible.com, iTunes, and Amazon for download. We will see more video interviews with authors, more roundtables on books, more book related multimedia content. Amazon will finally figure out how to create virtual book clubs.

3. Build on This Editorial Content Model for Other Verticals:

The Amazon Book Review section is just the start. The increase in book sales, Kindle purchases, and Audible subscriptions that results in having the world's best book related editorial content on the Amazon site will spur the creation of new areas for high quality editorial content. This editorial arc will follow the path that Amazon took on the e-commerce side, starting first with books and moving into music, movies, electronics, and consumer goods. The best and most varied movie reviews and music reviews will appear on Amazon.

The rapidity in which Amazon buys content websites and blogs in order to bring in talent and an established reader base will surprise industry watchers. The shift from paying for advertising to investing in quality editorial content will seem like a predestined change in hindsight, but during the time of this shift it will feel like a novel and risky tactic. What company would publish a bad review of a book or movie that they were trying to sell, particularly if the business model relies on selling lots of poor quality books and movies? What company would invest millions of dollars to create quality editorial content, give this content away free, and not even sell ads against this content?

Is this Amazon's future?

Full disclosure - I am an ECHO customer. We installed Echo360 to as a presentation capture system for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program in which I work on. The reason we chose Echo360 for our new blended program was that: a) we liked the appliance based model (reliability, security etc.), b) we liked the Echo360 player and the ability to create and publish multiple file types to multiple publishing platforms, and c) we liked the people at Echo360. There are many other good reasons for campuses to choose Echo360, and I highly recommend looking at the different solutions from different vendors as they all have strengths and weaknesses, but so far we've been happy with Echo360.

Our solid early foundation with Echo360 is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about the announcement today of a summer 2011 release for EchoSystem 4.0 and SafeCapture HD. This new release has two upgrades about which I'm particularly excited:

High Definition Capture: High def is huge for us. We need to capture faculty white board / chalk board writing, as many of the faculty teach by writing out ideas. Our existing strategy is to use a Windows 7 tablet laptop, capturing the pen capabilities on top of PowerPoint. The ability to write on a white board and capture the recording at 1080p at 30fps will significantly expand the utility of presentation capture.

iPad: I cant wait to see how Echo has put together the HTML 5 player for the iPad . It sounds like from the press release that the iPad experience will be closer to the browser experience, with the ability to navigate the presentation by jumping from scene to scene. The iPad app also allows for streaming of the captured presentations, allowing us to choose to secure the content or to enable a download option.

EchoSystem 4.0 also includes some features that other players in the market currently have, such as bookmarking, some social features, and the ability to display playlists. The competition in the lecture capture market is a good thing for both us and the various vendors, as we will see quality increase and prices fall.

Of course, this is all slidewear for now, I'm writing this blog from some materials provided by Echo360. I'll be interested to see what Echo360 has done to improve the software based personal capture system, and the ad hoc lecture capture interface. The management and scheduling web based interface needs a serious upgrade, as I find it balky and challenging to use. With HD and mobile options available, my wish would be for Echo360 to spend resources on improving usability and the user experience, rather than add lots of new features.

If you are looking at lecture capture solutions for your campus, then the introduction of EchoSystem 4.0 should be on your radar.

I'd be interested in hearing what lecture capture solution you have decided to go with, and the reasons behind your choice.

What are some of the other big advances going on in the lecture capture space?

What lecture capture companies will be left standing when this fragmented industry goes through the inevitable consolidation, roll-ups and mergers?

Warning. If you read My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe as audiobook, and listen while walking across campus, you will inevitably end up looking like a crazy person as you break out into uncontrollable laughter just as a tour of prospective students and their parents passes you on the green. I'm just saying.

Other Dangers of Reading My Korean Deli:

• If you buy this book now you will miss too many March Madness games, as NCAA basketball (or work or talking to your partner or children or other lesser pursuits) will not be able to compete.

• If you have Korean in-laws, and/or a Korean-American spouse, you will find yourself vigorous nodding your head as Ryder Howe describes the culinary, cultural, marital, and son-in-law intricacies, complications and delights of marrying into a Korean family.

• You may never complain about your difficult academic, technology, publishing, or whatever professional job again, as almost any gig seems infinitely easier than running a family owned convenience store and deli.

• You may think about subscribing to the Paris Review (Ryder Howe is a senior editor during the time his family ran the deli), for no better reason than you are loving reading My Korean Deli.

• You might decide to watch (on Netflix Instant) Paper Lion, the 1968 movie in which Alan Alda plays George Plimpton trying out for the the Detroit Lions. Plimpton, the founding editor of the Paris Review and Ryder Howe's boss, vividly and hilariously comes to life in My Korean Deli.

• You may abandon your dream of finding a "simpler" life and walking away from the world of academia, medicine, publishing, technology etc. etc. to start your own family business (bookstore, restaurant, cafe, deli etc), after reading about what the life of a small proprietor is actually like.

• You may put your idea on hold to move into your in-laws basement (particularly if they live on Staten Island) to save money for a down payment for your own home (as Ryder Howe and his wife did), deciding that on balance it might be wiser to remain a renter.

I'm nominating "My Korean Deli" for the funniest non-fiction book of 2011. Let's hope for some good competition.

What are you reading?