A great use of 30 minutes of your time – this recent discussion on publishing between Tim O’Reilly and Adobe’s Michael Gough.  [ via Robert Ivan ]

Here’s info some higher-end restaurants might prefer you NOT know about – William Poundstone’s new book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) includes a section on menu design, summarized here at New York Magazine.

Poundstone describes a variety of ways that marketers use your own instincts against your best interest, from cereal box sizes to the housing market. Here he is on a segment from NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday.

Chris Anderson, Wired magazine editor and author of “The Long Tail” and newly published “Free: The Future of Radical Price” has a nice comeback to his newfound critic, Malcom Gladwell.

Gladwell, who famously authored “The Tipping Point” and other books focused on the consultant/executive-at- the-airport market, used his New Yorker perch to take on Anderson in fairly weak effort. Anderson responds to the critique pretty well, but perhaps the best part of the skirmish was this comment from a reader on Anderson’s Long Tail blog:

The sad problem at the root of many journalists’ confusion, including Gladwell’s apparently, is that they thought all the revenue and profits rolling in to newspaper coffers in past decades reflected the value of their work when in fact much of it represented the value of the hard-to-match production and distribution chain that could pump out relatively cheap classified ads and Sunday supplements and blanket them all over town. The Internet, as it often does, disintermediated that distribution chain and much of the revenue and profits migrated elsewhere. Posted by: Aaron Pressman

Yep. That’s pretty well it. Not nice to hear, of course. Journalism is surely valuable and always will be, in whatever form it blends into as we go. But the bottom-line financial value of journalism has always been exaggerated. The sooner we get that point understood, the easier it’ll be to move on to the next phase.