For those of us who have preached the virtues of simplicity down the years, e-consultancy’s recent ‘Quarterly Digital Intelligence Briefing: Digital Trends for 2013’ made for an interesting read.

The collapse of complex business models – one of Clay Shirky’s signature pieces – long ago caught the eye; when applied to the world of online advertising, it makes for an ever more compelling read.

Particularly when you start to poke around the latest findings, which gives you a decent ‘snap-shot’ of the mood of marketeers in 2013, what are they thinking and above all the challenges are they facing right now. Read more on Marketers don’t think they have the right technology to succeed…

On the 16th January, 2006, I read a ‘quality’ piece of journalism by David Watkins on the MediaGuardian website.

It was the day of my 40th birthday. It was a piece of ‘quality’ writing – of the kind, I guess, that David Leigh would charge me and my broadband provider £2 a month for – that would turn my world upside down.

Just as Craig Newmark – one of the slayers-in-chief of the US newspaper classifieds market – was turning the once-comfortable world of the The San Francisco Chronicle, inside out with his little list. It is a worth a re-visit. If only for the fact that the doom of the printed newspaper has long been foretold.

Read more on The idea of a £2 broadband tax to save quality newspapers is an idea out of time…

For those that haven’t read it, may I commend the GQ piece on The Guardian to the house.

It is a worthy read and presents the same, anxious undercurrents that Peter Wilby’s recent piece in the New Statesman did; the doubters, in short, are afoot.

People, like me, whose natural habitat is such an institution and yet who fear for its future; who wonder out loud whether the path The Guardian are on really is the one to digital redemption; whether that away lies real danger. Read more on The Guardian can not see past the old digital fable that ‘if you build it, they will come’…