A penny for my thoughts? – The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd uses the paper’s Op-Ed pages to ruminate on the trend of outsourcing newspaper work to India. Dowd interviews James Macpherson, publisher of Pasadena Now, an online only news site, who fired his former staff of seven and now outsources production to India. “I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” Macpherson says in Dowd’s column. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

Huffington Post more valuable than some newspaper cos. – Yes, you read that right. The Huff Post, the news blog that repackages – or in Webspeak “repurposes” – news and columns created elsewhere along side posts written by its own often unpaid bloggers, raised $25 million in financing, putting its value at $100 million. According to Michael Learmonth’s story in Ad Age, that makes Arianna Huffington’s digital news venture more valuable than Lee Enterprises, which publishes the St. Louis Post Dispatch, or A. H. Belo, which publishes the Dallas Morning News, or Media General, which puts out the Tampa Tribune. It’s conventional freelance wisdom to follow the money and go where the work is, but in this case, freelancers should proceed with caution. While it’d be nice to be associated with an up and coming news aggregator like the Huff Post, is the clip worth the non paycheck you’d get for your efforts? Working for free is not a business model.

Notice anything different about this blog? – No, you don’t. But as of yesterday, WordPress parent company Automattic released a much-anticipated dashboard redesign. While readers of this blog won’t see any difference, behind the scenes is another story. The main page that WordPress bloggers like me use to write and manage posts got a major a face lift. So far, it’s been easy enough to navigate without having to peek at the instructions. But if you’re interested, here’s the complete documentation of the changes. According to Automattic, the changes will be released as version 2.7 to WordPress.org bloggers next week.

I finally met Arianna Huffington four years later. I was writing a column about politics and the Internet for Reuters and covered a speech she was making at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. By then Huffington was divorced, on her way to eventually severing ties with the Republican party, and on the stump to promote her latest book, Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom. She was as knowledgeable, articulate and mesmerizing as advertised.

Today, Huffington is famous – or infamous, depending on who you talk to – as the founder and chief creative power behind The Huffington Post, the influential news blog. Even before her Internet days, Huffington was not shy about promoting herself or her latest venture. That’s crystal clear in a new profile of her, The Oracle, The Many Lives of Arianna Huffington, by Lauren Collins, published in the Oct. 13 issue of The New Yorker.

Ten years ago, Huffington was already talking about the Internet’s potential power in politics. Here’s what I wrote in that Reuters column:

Today’s Internet-using pols still number a tiny minority. But that should grow as they learn how to exploit the medium to mobilize voters around issues they care about, said Arianna Huffington, the noted pundit. “The more they’re for the status quo, the less likely they’ll be to use it,” Huffington said. “The more politicians who are reformers, the more they’ll use the power of the Internet. We haven’t even begun to scratch its potential for communications in politics.”

Check out that last line again. Huffington wouldn’t launch her namesake Website for another seven years. But it’s clear she knew she was onto something.