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:

• All the News That’s Fit to Print… | Mohamed Nanabhay – I was interviewed in the The New York Times about Al Jazeera, our coverage of Gaza and new media. Noam Cohen who authored the article happened to lunch with Larry Lessig on Thursday before we did the interview and consequently scooped the news on our soon to be launched Creative Commons project
• Twitter under the microscope | First Monday – even when using a very weak definition of “friend” (i.e., anyone who a user has directed a post to at least twice) we find that Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends.
• Cutting Through Info-Clutter | Forbes.com – The rush to offshore services occurred because of lower salaries in developing countries. That produced a one-time gain for companies, which slowly is evaporating as salaries rise around the globe. Now, many IT managers are privately lamenting the loss of control over some development and management functions, such as the ability to quickly develop or modify software for a new business need or the ability to marshal resources for a new project.
• The U.S. Public’s Pro-Israel History | Pew Research Center – A substantial plurality of the American public has been steadfast in its support for Israel as the intensity of armed conflict in the Middle East has waxed and waned through the years. While Americans have on occasion voiced criticisms of specific tactics and operations undertaken by the Israeli government, their sympathy for the Jewish state has, with only minor variation, remained strong.
• Explaining the curse of work | New Scientist – Parkinson based his ideas not just on his war experience, but also his historical research. Between 1914 and 1928, he noted, the number of administrators in the British Admiralty increased by almost 80 per cent, while the number of sailors they had to administer fell by a third, and the number of ships by two-thirds. Parkinson suggested a reason: in any hierarchical management structure, people in positions of authority need subordinates, and those extra bodies have to be occupied- regardless of how much there actually is to do.
• David Carr: Will Someone Please Invent iTunes for News? | NYTimes.com – You've probably heard all this before…: "Is there a way to reverse the broad expectation that information, including content assembled and produced by professionals, should be free? If print wants to perform a cashectomy on users, it should probably look to what happened with music, an industry in which people once paid handsomely for records, then tapes, then CDs, that was overtaken by the expectation that the same product should be free.

  Mr. Jobs saw music as something else — as an ancillary software business to generate sales of the iPods and iPhones. That’s not a perspective that flattered people in the music business, but it did persuade listeners to pay for their wares."

• Gzing! Gzing! Gzing! | Economic Principals – There have been many skeins in the earmarking saga, many innovators. But at the center of the story is Gerry Cassidy, the poor boy from Brooklyn, who amassed a fortune of more than $100 million by devising a new kind of business, helping colleges and universities seek government money for their ambitious expansion plans, that grew eventually to include more than 1,100 clients,  including 24 of the 50 largest American corporations; coalitions and trade associations; public and private utilities; financial institutions; health care providers; state, city and county governments; international corporations; and foreign governments – all of them seeking special consideration, usually in the form of earmarks.
• Desiderius Erasmus | Medical Humanities Blog – Erasmus spent much time differentiating the roles the orator could take.  Embodying the profoundly humanist notion (traced back to Cicero and Quintillian) that speaking could only be effective (in promoting virtue, of course) if it was strictly tailored and shaped to the particular audience being addressed, Erasmus noted the different patterns of discourse in the contentio and the sermo.  The former exists where the speaker and the audience have different levels of knowledge, perhaps asymmetrical information.  The setting of a contentio is advocative in nature; the speaker aims to exhort, to persuade, to convince.  The objective is persuasion, not necessarily enhancing conceptual knowledge or even collective understanding.

  By contrast, in a sermo, the participants are all knowledgeable on the subject of the discussion, which operates more like a dialogue between respected colleagues.  Obviously, if one seeks to enter into a sermo and begins using rhetoric and methods more suited for t