Links for 05-12-2009

• Why Sync Is So Difficult - When you sell a sync product, you sell magic... But once it’s implemented, there’s no magic anymore, and the engineer is left to deal with asynchrony, slow bandwidth, third-party applications, and file systems that have different semantics.
• Survey: Consumers prefer DVDs to downloads | Digital Media - CNET News - But a lot of people still prefer the physical stuff.
• Why Physical Media Is Archaic « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing - I see anecdotal examples here and there that more people are willing to rent and/or own digital-only than in the past.
• Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives | Printer-friendly version - I do like B&H (and Adorama) but I'm not sure to what degree you can apply lessons from cream-of-the-crop NY photo store to national electronics retailer. I also tend to think that people who aren't schooled in the, um, social graces of New York City might not find B&H etc. to be such an appealing environment.
• Technology Review: Blogs: Jason Pontin's blog: How to Save Media - "The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press."
• Gawker - David Simon: Dead-Wrong Dinosaur - David Simon - No newspapers often don't do a great job and bloggers/etc. do cover local nitty-gritty news that they're interested in. But I see precious little evidence that ad hoc coverage is anything but very spotty.
• Forget Kindle DX. How about the ZuneBook? | Tech Broiler | ZDNet.com - A full-blown OS and LCD display present certain issues. But if there's a "tweener" device (between smartphone and ultraportable notebook) that might find a real ecological niche, it could well be a tablet of some sort.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard » Blog Archive » Fifteen years of epochal pronouncements - I'm still trying to figure out where in the middle I sit on all this.