These are some of the things that have caught my attention lately. It’s a more eclectic mix than just the news business, but then so’s life:

• Interview: Seth Godin on How Often to Post to Your Blog | Advertising Age – My goals in blogging are:

  To spread ideas
  To put my ideas out there and get them out of the way of the next idea
  To encourage people to add alacrity to their diet
  I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn't increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.

• Strategic communications is too important to bother with mere audience needs | Kim Andrew Elliott – KAE tells it like it is: "The model for international broadcasting as part of "strategic communications" is, of course, Radio Moscow. During the Cold War, Radio Moscow's content was certainly coordinated, by a central office, with the strategic needs of the USSR. It reported news that conformed with that strategy, ignored news that did not support the strategy, and took care to "craft and implement" scripts to support Soviet policy goals.
       Despite being the granddaddy of international broadcasting — more languages, more transmitters, more broadcast hours, more kilowatts, more budget than any other station — Radio Moscow never gathered more than 10 percent of the audience size of BBC or VOA. It was not providing the credible news that international radio audiences wanted."
• Al Jazeera Announces Launch of Free Footage under Creative Commons License | Mohamed Nanabhay’s Blog – Doha Qatar – January 13, 2009: Al Jazeera Network today announced the world's first repository of broadcast quality video footage released under the ‘Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution’ license. Select Al Jazeera video footage – at this time footage of the War on Gaza – will be available for free to be downloaded, shared, remixed, subtitled and eventually rebroadcasted by users and TV stations across the world with acknowledgement to Al Jazeera.
• "An iTunes for news" – the greatest of the failed analogies for the new news | Seamus McAuley – iTunes is a business model for distributed content, a way of monetising the fragment itself. Until every news article, every photo, every headline costs something (even a fraction of a fraction of a penny) to read or includes a paid-for ad we do not and will not have an iTunes for news.
• R.I.P. Enterprise RSS | ReadWriteWeb – As a NetNewsWire enthusiast, I find this totally depressing: "A smattering of employees in big companies are using the free consumer app Google Reader, a paltry substitute for a business class RSS reader, and the rest of the business world is apparently satisfied to get information whenever they happen to stumble over it. It's insane – a solid RSS strategy can be a huge competitive advantage in any field. We have no idea why so relatively few people see that.

  We love RSS and this makes us really sad. If much of the rest of the world wants to ignore this technology, though, it's their loss. It's our bread and butter. Neglecting RSS at work seems to us like pure insanity."

• An answer to David Carr’s question on "how to build an iTunes for newspapers." | Jack Shafer – Why should a customer pay for newspapers online when they can get them free via the Web? Well, why does anybody pay for a print newspaper when they can get it free via the Web? The first answer is that despite the wonderfulness of the Web, the print version still does many things better than its electronic cousin. If you read newsprint, you know what I'm talking about. If you don't, I can't explain it to you.