I was puzzled to see that the Guardian has an article today on Libya, Switzerland, the European Union and the ban on travel by top Libyan officials. I read nearly to the end before I found the news peg – normally higher up in a story, but when the news is old and editors are looking for an excuse to run it late, the peg gets hidden a bit further down in the story. Here it is:

The problem was sufficiently worrying for Libya’s man in London, Omar Jelban, to convene a rare press conference at the Knightsbridge offices of the people’s bureau (embassy) to “clarify” Tripoli’s position. “It is now difficult for any EU citizen to come to Libya,” he said on Tuesday, insisting that Libya had been forced to take reciprocal action because of Swiss bad faith. “We are ready to resolve this problem with the Swiss. This is a bilateral issue that has nothing to do with other European countries.”

That doesn’t tell me why the Guardian wanted to bother running this, since there is nothing new in the story, just rehashing. I think the clue is the last sentence. My guess is that the editor couldn’t resist running this sentence, a good decision:

Gaddafi-watchers say the key to understanding these rows with the Swiss and the Americans is his acute sense of personal honour – the slight to his son, his family and to himself. In reflective moments, Libya’s diplomats must sometimes hark back to simpler times before their leader abandoned terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and came in from the cold.

Link to story in the Guardian, UK

The Financial Times is more aggressively bumping out those of us who don’t subscribe, so we don’t get more than a fleeting glimpse of articles after the magic free number. So I’m not sure but I think the first line of the article said each Twitter character (not word?) is worth more than $7, based on what a nameless person who is, of course, close to the story, says new investors are willing to pay for it. The more words the better, and it’s irrelevant if they actually communicate anything. I wonder if Twitter has invited Qadaffi to tweet, a great way to multiply empty words quickly.

So googling “FT Twitter” to see what I missed, I trip over this intriguing bit of media data: Malcolm Coles in the UK putting together a table of how many followers various British media companies have on Twitter. Guardian Tech is way out in front, over 800,000, while Guardian News fares better than the FT, some 26,000 compared to roughly 20,000. This maybe tells us more about techies, who hug Twitter, than newsbies, who don’t quite get it, and more about tech writers than news writers. Whether it tells us much about the true value of Twitter is dubious.

But then again, I couldn’t read the FT article correctly. Their loss or mine?

I turned to the NY Times, which carries an article that so far you and I can read for free. It tells me Twitter is completing a “round of financing of around $100 million that values the three-and-a-half-year-old start-up at $1 billion.” It points out that the company “managed to raise money and score an impressive valuation without ever actually bringing in any significant revenue on its own.”

Sorry, I’m old school and I look for black socks, x number sold = x dollars, so I had to turn to Robert Scoble to make a bit more sense of what’s going on, and it worked, more or less. I found something useful down towards the bottom of this post. I looked at what he had to say on Twitter. Got totally sidetracked by something called the SUL, which sounds like it’s for me. A list of where to go on Twitter if you can’t make heads or tails of it.

Duh, weren’t we talking about Twitter’s new investors? I probably wouldn’t have bothered to read except that I know Robert Scoble is a live person, who comes to Geneva for the Lift conferences, and is in fact pretty congenial. I went to a cocktail where he was more or less the guest of honor but not having done my homework I didn’t know that and marched up to the guy alone in the corner, wine in hand and said, “Hi! So who are you?” thinking I would make him feel at  home. “I’m Microsoft’s blogger,” he said. Right. He’s since moved on.

Keep talking. Somebody thinks our words have value. Nananananah (wow: 77 bucks right there!)

Some days you just have to love certain journalists and today I love the BBC’s Megan Lane, for her superb “Short History of Long Speeches,” which reminds us that while Libya’s Leader of the Revolution Muammar Qadaffi was a bit over the top with his rambling speech at the UN General Assembly, he’s a long way from catching up with Fidel Castro or that great speaker, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk whose fans were surely rewarded for endurance. But I still have a fond spot for Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, who had a tendency to read the same page twice, thereby keeping his listeners alert by throwing in that monkey wrench (spanner to some of you) that makes listeners wonder if they haven’t heard this before, and how could that be.

A long time ago, when I was not a fan of Ronald Reagan, I read Peggy Noonan’s book about the challenges of being his speechwriter. One of the astonishing things, for me as a Reagan skeptic, was to learn that he wrote his own speeches, and he liked them short. It made me like him a bit better.