Bonus content from the book. Here's Rachel Maddow on how she and her team approached the MSNBC website after she was hired:

MSNBC.com's former CEO Charlie Tillinghast also taught me a lot about the intersection of timeliness and exclusivity in online business models. I sometimes draw the following diagram for students, with each quadrant displaying the archetype of that intersection of traits.

To mitigate these costs, network providers typically forego creating permanent connections between users. Instead, they create transient ones. You route calls through centralized switching stations, where the operator temporarily connects two users and then disconnects them when their conversation is over. But even that doesn't hold down the exploding infrastructure costs entirely. Bell operator switchboards, for instance, were expensive marvels of engineering and fiercely guarded patents. 6/x

If you run a telephone network, on the other hand, your costs go up exponentially as you sign up new subscribers. That's because the infrastructure necessary to connect all these people scales geometrically. To see what I mean, take a look at these stills from "The Far Sound," and old film about the Bell system: 4/x