Clay Shirky explains why we need the news environment to be chaotic.
On the difference, or lack thereof, between the new and ad biz (emphasis added):

So long as newspapers faced little competition for advertisers or readers, this was a distinction without a difference, but as papers are being sundered by the internet, we can see how tangled the system always was. Outside a relative handful of financial publications, there is no such thing as the news business. There is only the advertising business. The remarkable thing about the newspapers’ piece of that business isn’t that they could reliably generate profits without accomplishing much in the way of innovation–that could just as easily describe the local car dealership. The remarkable thing is that over the last couple of generations, those profits supported the fractional bit of those enterprises that covered the news.

On how the news got to be bundled the way it is:

The rationale for creating such a bundle went something like this: “We will print enough content to fill the hole left after we’ve sold the advertising space. We will include content proportional to the amount and intensity of reader interest, modified somewhat by editorial judgment. Overall, the value of the bundle will be more than the sum of its parts.”

And a fun experiment to do with an oldy timey printed news paper:

Buy a newspaper. Cut it up. Throw away the ads. Sort the remaining stories into piles. Now, describe the editorial logic holding those piles together.

via The Vimeo Blog

From The New York Times Diner’s Journal (via PSFK):

Sam Calagione, the founder and president of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, clearly enjoys adventurous brewing. But less exotic crafting has its appeal, too, as Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck’s “cinemagraphs” — photographs with movement on a loop — make clear. “My favorite days at Dogfish are the ones in which we are brewing a beer for the first time,” Mr. Calagione writes from Rehoboth Beach, Del. Instead of only describing the process or using “plain ol’ photos,” he invited the cinemagraphers, who are also his friends, to document a day of making strawberry beer: “Their amazing cinemagraphs have a mystical effect of bringing the viewer into the moment.”

Two of my favorite things – beer and animated GIFs.

Tangled Web Of Vice

So HP says Apple is not TouchPad’s target. So says Richard Kerris, HP’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, to The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple:

HP acknowledged Apple’s dominance in the tablet market, but said Apple wasn’t its target with the TouchPad.

“We think there’s a better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs,” said Kerris. “This market is in its infancy and there is plenty of room for both of us to grow.”

John Gruber over at Daring Fireball agrees:

Smart. Reminds me of that Steve Jobs mantra from the late ’90s: “We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace the notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job.”

Bullshit.

HP is a company who’s senior Vice President and General Manager of the Palm Global Business Unit (formerly the CEO of Palm, replacing dipshit Ed Colligan) helped develop the iPod at Apple as a senior vice president. Apple’s influence at HP, through Rubenstein, can be seen all over HP’s product design, advertising and marketing. Rubenstein knows the important parts of Apple’s business to copy and he has.

HP even based the price points on TouchPad models with the iPad. I can’t find the link, but I believe it was Gruber who also pointed out even the name, TouchPad, contains the names of two of Apple’s most popular products.

As Sherlock Holmes said, “No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design.”

Aside from the part about not going after Apple, the other point of bullshit in Kerris’ statement was about the “better opportunity for us to go after the enterprise space and those consumers that use PCs”. If the iPad has proven anything, it’s people in the corporate space love the iPad.

HP is clearlying being smart about webOS. They’re focusing on what matters to people – the experience, the software, the Human Experience, but make no mistake, not only are they watching Apple’s every move, but Apple’s and HP’s target markets for tablets very much align.