Discovery Communications, which owns the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet, hopes to turnaround its failed efforts to get a foothold on the Internet by buying the popular website HowStuffWorks.com for $250 million, according to the Wall Street Journal. Discovery will use this popular base to make its library of videos more easily available to the public.

HowStuffWorks.com, a privately held company whose best known owner is investor Carl Icahn, was founded by Marshall Brain in 1998. Brain is a university professor in North Carolina. He built the audience for the site by analyzing what people were searching for on the Internet and creating content to answer those queries.

In addition to HowStuffWorks.com, the purchase will include several other digital properties including a map database, which are not yet profitable. Discovery hopes that by controlling a website that already gets 3.8 million unique U.S. users each month it will have more success drawing Internet users to its online content. Chief Executive David Zaslav, who has been redesigning Discovery in his own image since taking over in January, told the Journal he believes this acquisition will give Discovery the "online firepower" it's been lacking.

Everyone in the FCC and the powerful Christian Right lobby is pushing cable operators to create more family-friendly options. And they finally have. But just because something exists, does not mean that it's well-publicized.

My husband and I chuckled behind our hands when my brother-in-law told us to ask for the Spanish-language package on Comcast - but it saved us money on the channels we used most. The cable company's new Family Tier, priced at only $33.29 in the Denver, Colo. area, would be even better for us (and keep us away from the dreaded Fox News, which for some reason is considered non-family-friendly option - a topic for an entirely other post, I'm sure). But, as the Denver Post reports, Comcast isn't exactly being proactive about letting consumers know they can opt in to the kindler, gentler bargain content.