Gladwell’s latest article discusses how Davids beat Goliaths. Like all his writing, it is pleasant and stimulating.

I recommend reading the whole thing. Lots of nice examples of finding asymmetries to exploit. One detail that Gladwell glosses over that deserves further thought: formal vs. informal rules. In the David vs. Goliath case, David broke the informal norms of how duels were conducted. In other examples (full court presses in basketball and computer-designed fleets for the tabletop war game) there were formal rule sets.

While a formal rule set provides a fixed framework within which competitive behavior runs free, it excludes the most basic form of competitive interaction: namely, who sets the rules. While the press offered Ranadive’s team a way of hiding their weakness, an even better way to hide their weakness would have been to change the rules of the game more dramatically. A baseball pitcher, for example, would love to move the mound closer to the batter to get an advantage. He can’t because the formal rules prohibit it, so he’s left looking for loop-holes or ill-defined areas for finding a competitive advantage.

The war game example has two potential interpretations:

(1) The success of the computer-generated fleets was an artifact of the artificiality of the rules. The computer search algorithm found an unexpected and unintended consequence of the set of rules chosen by the designers. In this case, all we have learned is that it is hard to design rules that will produce the desired dynamics (in this case, stylized space warfare that looks similar to WWII-era naval warfare).

(2) The rules accurately described some environment that we care about. In this case, we have actually learned something about what strategies will succeed in that environment (unless, of course, in simplifying the environment we’ve left out some key consideration that makes the freak strategy successful in the sim and not in real life. I actually expected Gladwell’s story to explain that the swarms of little gun boats didn’t work (despite seeming to be a logical response to the game’s rules), much as Jefferson’s gunboat defense failed in the face of the British Navy.

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Gladwell also makes interesting reference to Ivan Arreguin-Toft’s work on the success rate of “David” strategies. Deserves some further reading.

In a duo of articles that are sure to up the alley of those in the publishing world, the Economist examines the challenges newspapers face in adapting to the information age.

What strikes me is that the original business model of newspapers packaged content (a module of information combining current events, business news, classifieds and sports) with a delivery vehicle (printed text on broadsheet). The internet offers a new delivery vehicle, but there is still the need for the content newspapers provide. The challenge they face is how to decouple their content from their delivery vehicle.

I think that some sort of aggregator, mediated by some editorial perspective, would be the best answer. At the very least, it is what I would want. Sort of like the EarlyBird, except with a specifiable scope. So someone could say, “I live in Boston so I want local news, Red Sox, Celtics and Pats coverage, but I also want defense-focused news as well as the standard 5 pages of front-page and national news I’d find from the NY Times, WSJ, WaPo and Financial Times.” It would also be great if I could get that as a package either on my desktop, laptop, handheld or Kindle. And for sanity’s sake, it should be self-contained so I know when I’m done.

That is one of the challenges of the internet age: when have you read enough? Sitting in the sea of content, you can easily get so far away from shore that you lose all bearing. So some structure would be useful. With a solid foundation like I described above, it would be much easier to control my blog consumption through my bloglines account. And then I might be able to better say when enough is enough and I’ve done my reading for the day.