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Many small nations add to their revenue by offering preferential regulatory environments for businesses of various kinds. Think the Swiss and banking or the Cayman Islands and money laundering. Iceland is seeking to become the best place in the world to be an investigative journalist. Nieman Journalism Lab has the details: Jónsdóttir explained that the proposal does not contain final legislation, but would instruct the government to create a package of laws that enhance journalistic freedoms in specific ways. According to an email from Assange (which was then leaked, ironically enough) the amendments would cover source protection, whistleblower protection, immunity for ISPs and other carriers, freedom of information requests, and strong limits on prior restraint. They would also provide protection against libel judgements from other jurisdictions, much as the United States may soon do with the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009. ...

The New York Times interviews George Cloutier, business book author and CEO of American Management Services. You might argue that he comes from the Genghis Khan school of management, but I honestly found very little to disagree with in the interview.

But the Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about. ...

I’m building a very thin Web interface for an internal application. The back end is built using Java, and I’ll be providing a Web service for use by the front end, which is built using PHP and JavaScript. The question is, if you were starting from scratch today, what would you use to glue the two together? Options include: Providing a SOAP service, and implementing the SOAP client in PHP. (This option is only included for completeness, I’m not going to implement it this way.) Providing a REST Web service that returns XML and implementing the client in PHP. Providing a REST Web service that returns XML and implementing the client in JavaScript. Providing a REST Web service that returns XML and using JavaScript and PHP as the client where appropriate. Providing a REST Web service that returns JSON and implementing the client in JavaScript. I have been leaning toward the JSON solution, but I’m curious to know what other people think. ...

Over at the Flickr developer blog, Kellan Elliott-McCrea interviews Simon Willison about how his new project, Wildlife Near You, uses the Flickr API. Simon explained how the site came to be here – it was built by a team of geeks who went to an exotic locale to see what they could build in a week. The interview is a great read if you want to get jazzed about Web services – providing a robust machine interface to a site’s functionality can really unlock a ton of power. ...

I’ll probably never be a guest on the Daily Show, but Ethan Watters’ advice for guests was interesting anyway. I’ve seen this advice from several former guests: Don’t try to be funny unless you ARE funny. If you are not sure if you are funny, assume that you are not and if you try to be in this situation you will look like an incredible jackass because you are sitting next to someone who is preternaturally, almost freakishly, hilarious. ...

Facebook’s coming at it from a corporate position. It’s basically like AOL in 1997 — everything is there and there’s no need to go anywhere else. Matt Haughey say something both true and profound.

Most people know that the employment situation right now is pretty terrible, but the precise way in which it is terrible is poorly understood. The absolute numbers are very high, but the suffering is not evenly distributed. The statistic I see getting thrown around a lot is that unemployment for college educated people is 5% – essentially full employment. Nobody I know has had any luck hiring programmers lately. Unemployment among those with only a high school degree is at 15%, up from 12% this time last year. ...

If there’s one person I listen to on health care, it’s Atul Gawande. His piece on the problems with fee for service in health care was probably the most influential piece on health care costs that anybody wrote last year. Salon magazine just ran a new interview with Gawande about his book on checklists and more generally the importance of building effective systems rather than focusing on individual performance. I think there are lessons for everyone in both observations. Gawande was also a guest on the Daily Show this week. ...

Most of the posts about the throw down between Macmillan and Amazon have talked about the “agency model,” as opposed to the model that Amazon prefers for the Kindle. Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains how the model works: At the heart of the model is the proposition that ebooks aren’t essentially different from hardcopy books. Ebooks are just another repro technology. Furthermore, online ebook sellers like Amazon aren’t publishers; they’re distributors or booksellers.* ...