Over the past several weeks, we’ve been ramping up our use of Twitter to share interesting links, promote our work, interact with readers, and collaborate on reporting. Consider following us over there or checking out our five most-recent tweets in the sidebar at right. Here are some of the more popular and interesting links we’ve posted on Twitter this week:

— The week began with a feature in The New York Times on the copyright considerations of excerpting news content on the web. (Nieman Lab director Josh Benton is quoted a few times.) All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka also turned up a few more instances of the Times threatening legal action against aggregators. And Sam Bayard of Harvard’s Citizen Media Law Project offered a levelheaded analysis of the new ads on Google News.

— An unscientific but smart study found that the lifespan of a link on Twitter is just five minutes. I thought that was important for news organizations to recognize when determining how to use the microblogging service. Glorified news tickers might be the wrong approach. Related: Sky News named a Twitter correspondent to scour the site for breaking news and interact with readers.

— Some innovation links: YouTube got newsier by adding headlines from Google News and pulling related video from its partners. Mark Luckie of 10,000 Words checked out 21 news sites that are formatted for the iPhone. And a new application removes all the “junk” (read: advertisements) from news article pages.

— Richard Tofel, a former Wall Street Journal executive, argued that the Journal’s success in charging for content could be replicated by non-financial news outlets.

— Howard Owens, who recently left his position as director of digital publishing at GateHouse Media, is making a go at his online-only news site in Batavia, New York. On his blog this week, Owens wrote several important posts, including “Why home page ads may be more valuable than story page ads” and “Why nobody clicks on your home page links.” He also wrote a long post defending GateHouse’s suit against The New York Times Company but has since taken it down. I have the text if you’re interested.

— And we try to avoid those death-of-media stories you find everywhere else, but this one proved too hard to resist and very popular among our followers on Twitter: video of “News” literally descending from the Rocky Mountain News building as workers took down the late newspaper’s sign: