Archive for January, 2008
CotC on Twitter
You can now follow Carnival of the Capitalists on Twitter, where we’ll announce each new edition and sometimes other things. Logically the CotC profile is at http://twitter.com/cotc.
Carnival of the Capitalists for January 29, 2008
This week’s guest host of the Carnival of The Capitalists is cehwiedel from One Man Band: DIY Online Business for One. She is a freelance commercial writer with 35 years experience writing everything from technical manuals to news releases to website copy.
cehwiedel’s Carnival of The Capitalists:
One of Jay Solo’s avowed goals for CotC v2.0 is making the Carnival worth the time invested — not just by hosts but also by readers.
To me, that means that serving as a fluff-and-bullsh!t filter is an important part of hosting. We hosts serve, that readers may find true gold not fool’s gold.
So here are your hot and savory CotC servings!
Pick of the Litter:
Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends wins Best of Show with the kick-off post of a new section on marketing with “Top Experts Dish with their Best Kept Marketing Secrets.” I had already snagged this post myself. Then Jay forwarded it with his own stamp of approval. Ya knocked it outta da park, Anita!
Small Business & Entrepreneurship:
Matthew Paulson at American Small Business News asks a big question of prospective entrepreneurs: “Are You Ready to Manage Your Small Business?” The decision to go freelance was easy for me personally to avoid enforced transplantation to a cubicle farm by my former employer. By now, almost two years on, I am having way too much fun to consider returning to Cubeville. Matthew Paulson’s article considers what happens at the next stage, when the solo entrepreneur is faced with adding employees to sustain growth.
This might have been filed under “Marketing” but I decided to plump out this section. Besides, writers and novelists generally should consider themselves small business persons. Roland Hachmann at Web Jungle points out a case of a novelist unsatisfied with his publisher’s marketing efforts who took matters into his own hands, with happy results.
Big Business Management:
David Evans at Catalyst Code tangles with a tiger by declaring Steve Jobs’s current digital media strategy an eventual failure in “Apple’s Achilles Heel.” You can’t accuse Evans of picking on the little guy!
Thomas Wailgum at CIO’s Information Collective ponders the lessons learned about risk management and information security by the mind-blowing loss of $7.2 billion by French bank Société Générale at the hands of a single person, Jérôme Kerviel. To read “Computers Aren’t as Devious, or Smart, as Us” is to be nervous about how long it’s been since passwords were force-changed, to sign off more quickly on implementing two-factor authentication, and to feel queasy about the concept of cloud computing.
Karl Goldfiend at Coaching Sales Champions offers stellar advice for finding and growing good sales people in “Finding Talent - Unearthing potential and making stars” — advice that can be applied to finding and growing good people no matter what field.
Markets, Investing & Taxes:
Will the current disarray in the housing market provide an opening for foreign investors to buy out America, Inc.? Ken Sterling at Pivotal Investing thinks that folks in China and Abu Dhabi are more subtle, looking for longer range influence. Read “China, Abu Dhabi Buy Keys To U.S. Influence” for his understanding of their aims.
Speaking of market disarray, did I hear someone mutter “short term stimulus?” James Hamilton at Econbrowser talks right out loud about last week’s Fed rate cut in “The Fed makes its move”. The Fed may have moved, but I’m waiting for the second shoe to drop on Wednesday. If the Fed cuts another half a percentage off its rate, I just might refinance to pay for remodeling our house — long overdue. But if Bernanke wants me to take the longterm risk, he has to do better than last week’s cut!
One more on the housing mess? Sure: it can only get worse! Dan Melson at Searchlight Crusade weighs the longterm consequences of buyer’s remorse in “Buyer’s Agency, Due Diligence, and the Illusion of Comity.” Not remorse for purchasing a house — for a poor choice of real estate agents. Melson warns against entering into a business agreement under the illusion that everybody’s friendly. (For another cautionary tale against the notion that “We’re all friends here,” see Thomas Wailgum below.)
If business is good, you’ll need to worry about taxes, corporate and personal. Kurt Brouwer at Fundmastery Blog helps you to understand whether attempts to refill the government treasury by taxing the rascally rich work at all, in “Does Soaking The Rich Actually Work?” Hint: keep in mind the law of unintended consequences.
Marketing:
We have dueling entries!
Rob at BusinessPundit calls attention to an article at Fast Company that declares tipping-point guru Malcolm Gladwell is all wet.
Influentials, schminfluentials!
In contrast, Jonny Bentwood at Technobabble 2.0 has posted a link to a white paper about measuring online influence based on a roundtable last year.
Fight, fight, fight!
Thinking about using online social networks to market your business? Not sure where to start? Then read Brenda Aulinskis’s post at Compete entitled “Behavior Match: Social Networking and Auto Shoppers” that describes matching car buyers with online communities.
In the place of honor at the tail of the carnival comes one of my favorite frequent CotC revellers, Wayne Hurlburt, talking defense in “Recession management: Positive brand image” at Blog Business World.
Closing:
Always ask for the sale!
Suggest entries via bizosphere@gmail.com if you see or have written a great business or economics post. Please include a brief description, as well as the link, naturally. That might help sell it if we’re not sure about including it, in addition to helping us follow it if the topic is esoteric from our perspective. We’re still monitoring thecotc@gmail.com, so no worries if you submit the entry there instead.
If you’d like to host, or have questions about doing so that are unanswered here, e-mail host @ this domain.
Hosts and Posts
We’ve finally received some entries this week that might make it into the next CotC edition. They’re coming in somewhat lightly, and what does come in tends to be from the knee-jerk entrants that did so much to drive the change. There is surely a place for those, like one of the more freewheeling carnivals, or one of the carnivals for which they’re, say, actually on topic.
However, we’d still like entries! Just mean them, eh?
We’re going to need hosts for all weeks following this one. That is, starting with the Tuesday, February 5 edition. Hosting is different these days. For one thing, you don’t actually have to be a blogger yourself.
Oh sure, it makes sense if you are. You’d be more used to putting a post like this together. You’d be more interested in the self-promotion involved. But anyone could do it, if they were interested.
You see, the edition itself is hosted here, not on your blog. The process goes something like this:
As the host, you get link(s) as appropriate, bragging rights, and the ability to promote your blog, business or cause a bit, while also putting your spin on the content.
If interested, you can e-mail host or jay @ this here domain, or one of the previously mentioned addresses.
Five Years On
If you haven’t already, you should read Rob May’s post on How Five Years of Blogging Has Changed Me.
We both began blogging just shy of five years ago, and some of his observations are also my own.
Carnival of the Capitalists for January 22, 2008
This week’s guest host of the Carnival of The Capitalists is Mike from PartnerUp, the social network for entrepreneurs.
Mike’s Carnival of The Capitalists:
In an effort to keep as high of a signal-to-noise ratio as possible this week, I choose to go with quality over quantity. The posts that made the cut for this week’s carnival are all very insightful and well worth the read.
Also, I’ve never included an ordinary article in the carnival before, but this week Rob at BusinessPundit pointed out a great article by one of my favorite sites, Forbes.com Entrepreneurs, about the most and least profitable businesses to start. I found the list interesting and inspirational, so I included it in the carnival.
Human Resources
—————————
John Phillips presents Are psychologists dumb? posted at The Word On Employment Law.
Susan Heithfield presents How to Manage a Deadbeat Employee at About.com Human Resources Blog.
Internet/Technology
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Mike presents Complete list of 2007 web/tech acquisitions posted on The StartUp Blog.
Nikole Gipps presents Gas Stations Don’t Need Blogs posted at Small Business Essentials.
Mark presents TBS to Operate NBA Digital Assets posted at SportsBiz.
cehwiedel presents Disintermediation and Web 2.0, a look at a Web 2.0 buzzword (disintermediation) from the POV of content creators posted at Prosthetic Device.
The Economy
————————-
Gavin Ingham presents Selling In A Recession - Why Some People Are Going To Crash And Others Are Going To Fly posted at Gavin Ingham.
Entrepreneurship
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Maureen Farrell presents The Most And Least Profitable Businesses To Start on Forbes.com Entrepreneurs.
Wayne Hurlbert presents Home offices: Capitalism helping the environment posted at Blog Business World.
That’s it for this week’s edition. Thanks to Mike for hosting, and helping work out finer points of how a guest host/editor for editions posted here could work effectively.
Be sure to visit PartnerUp and The Startup Blog there, where they hosted the October 29, 2007 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.
In keeping with the new format, next weeks edition will again appear here, in the capable hands of C.E.H. Wiedel, previously seen hosting the December 3, 2007 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists at One Man Band.
Suggest entries via bizosphere@gmail.com if you see or have written a great business or economics post. Please include a brief description, as well as the link, naturally. That might help sell it if we’re not sure about including it, in addition to helping us follow it if the topic is esoteric from our perspective. We’re still monitoring thecotc@gmail.com, so no worries if you submit the entry there instead.
If you’d like to host, or have questions about doing so that are unanswered here, e-mail host @ this domain.
At Last! This Week’s Newsy Carnival of the Capitalists…
This is going to be a long introduction, as there is much to say. If you are eager to get past it, scroll on down for the entries. Way down.
Blog carnivals as a concept are dead. They have been for a while. Horse flesh seldom looked so tenderized. I had planned to write a post detailing why I say that, and still do. As such, it’s become clear that Carnival of the Capitalists cannot continue as it has; as a topical blog carnival in the traditional definition I largely originated.
Sure, now it’s a brand. Not as positive or well-known a brand as it ought to be, but worth keeping. So how do you create something called Carnival of the Capitalists, keep the best of what that was supposed to but couldn’t be as a more or less “crowd sourced” meme, then improve it and add value from there?
Leaving Intending to leave any more verbose explanations for other posts, it goes something like this:
Carnival of the Capitalists will be a weekly post on bizosphere.com, where there may be some number of other posts, no longer mainly administrative. While retaining the name, there will be no pretense of being a blog carnival under the old definition, which many so-called carnivals didn’t adhere to in the first place.
It will seek to include a set of links to especially compelling recent blog posts on business and economics topics.
It will attempt to build on the idea there are good posts that few will ever see, out there on random blogs few will ever hear of, and that it’s good for the blogosphere to bring them to the attention of more people, including people who might not do much blog reading. Not that posts from better known blogs will be excluded out of hand, but the same people being in CotC every week, with posts good, bad or indifferent, runs counter to Rob’s original idea of discovery.
Where will these links come from?
In part, they will come from submissions. Those can be self-submitted, as most have been in the past. They can also be submitted by readers who like what they see, which has always been permitted, but seldom done and not advertised.
In part, they may be hand-picked by the host editor, who can be a different person or team week to week. For the next edition, that will either be me, or a possible volunteer I have in mind. For subsequent editions? If you’re interested, feel free to e-mail: host at bizosphere dot com. Please send from a monitored, valid e-mail address, and be aware that the address replying to you will not be the “host” address.
Why be a host under the new concept? Let’s go back to why be a host under the original concept.
The reasons for hosting were:
Taking the above list one at a time, then:
That doesn’t really sound worse. Some of the details will need to be worked out. For instance, will an editor comb the interwebs for hand-picked posts, while I screen entries? Will I pre-screen entries and forward the better ones to the editor to select from? Not sure. The first guest editors/hosts will help shape the details, is what I’m thinking.
The model I have in mind is what a business magazine with an online presence might do to add value for readers and engage with the business blogosphere.
Yeah, you want people to come read your articles, or your in-house blogs. However, once a week you have an editor comb blogs for cool business posts readers might not see otherwise, and that might be topics or angles they wouldn’t see in your virtual pages. Going even more progressive, you give readers or bloggers a way to suggest posts they have seen or written. You might even toss links to some of it, or posts centered around those links, in some of the routine posts. The cream, though, goes in the roundup, suitably narrated and/or quoted to help readers pick what they want to click.
Instead of “best of the web today,” think of it as “best of the business blogosphere this week.”
Let’s see, anything else offhand?
This site will be redesigned. I expect to be looking for ads or sponsorship or whatever, and there are a couple possible routes to that already in mind. I estimated recently that I’d put in about $60,000 in work managing CotC over the years. Given the choice of killing it off and accepting quality can never be kept up under the existing model, or dramatically changing it in a way that revives and improves it and holds a chance of recompense, of course I’m going to attempt the latter, no hiding or apologizing for it.
The archival CotC material will be kept, especially links to past editions that still exist. There’s a lot of history there, and a ton of gratitude to everyone who participated.
I’m going to phase out submissions through the Blog Carnival site, helpful as their almost 100% spam-free submission form has been. Any random blogger can show up there and enter any old thing, knowing or caring nothing about CotC. The form encourages entries lacking a description of the entry by the blogger entering.
Entries should be sent to bizosphere at gmail dot com, from a valid, monitored e-mail address. They should include links to the post and blog. They should include a brief description of the post and perhaps why you think it ought to be included. If you are not the author, let us know. Blogs are the intended entrants for CotC. However, it’s not out of the question that we might entertain linking mainstream articles, clearly indicated as such. More importantly, that’s the kind of thing I might like to link during the week, between editions.
Which implies you don’t have to be e-mailing a link intending it for CotC, but can e-mail one for general consideration.
We’re going to keep a deadline for now, with respect to CotC submissions. It will remain 3:00 PM eastern time on Sunday. If it arrives after that, it is presumed to go in next week’s batch.
The big change will be the edition day. Yeah, if we’re ready we might publish early; as early as Sunday night. However, I’m declaring Tuesday the new CotC day. There were various reasons for choosing Monday originally, some still valid, others, like not conflicting with “the other carnival” by avoiding Wednesday, are moot. So hey, I’m only a day late now, instead of two. Go me!
I’ve typed enough “meet the new boss” introduction. I will post further on details at Bizosphere - Home of Carnival of the Capitalists as needed or inspired to get and keep things rolling. The caveat is I am also busy with other things, like trying to bring in enough money to pay rent in a couple weeks.
Here are the entries, almost but not exactly in the order received. Be sure to scan all the way through, as some of the best are toward the end. There are also some I tagged “maybe” and didn’t include in the heat of putting this together, but perhaps should have in some cases.
If you’ve been scrolling to reach the entries, you can stop now!
This is all from submissions. My plot to make this the first newfangled edition failed, so it’s the last more or less fully traditional edition, depending how things go as far as the next one.
Green Rising somehow escaped my “excess cited text” detector with Battle of the Bees, about an unlikely acquisition by Clorox in its attempt to be and seem more “green.”
Ian Welsh sounds a rather cynical tone in Why Financial Crises Will Keep Happening. Not the only entry, included or not, that struck me so, or that went into financial crises or talk of recession, or into how prosperity for others abroad must be bad for us. It’s interesting to host and see such spontaneous themes.
Steven Lohrenz asks the burning question Can Your Business Survive A Major Failure? Featuring Army wisdom.
Keeping it on a similar note of coping with disaster, or at least change, What is Adaptive Capacity? Follow the link and Never the Same River Twice will explain.
Do You Feel Compelled to Support Your Boss’s Personal Interests? This Free Money Finance might not have made it in, but I’ve been there, and I doubt it’s unusual. If not pressure to buy cookies, then to donate - perhaps even through regular withholding - to a charity the company (it can go beyond an individual boss) supports. It may not be as common anymore, but companies used to “allow” automatic contributions to United Way, with varying pressure. I posted about them in 2005. The links that inspired that post are dead, but it still gives you the family experience.
Continuing with post titles in the form of a question (Alex Trebek would be proud), InsureBlog asks if you’ve been Audited Lately? Not by the IRS, but by an insurance company, to enable them to torment you save money.
Business and Blogging issues a Challenge: Can You Stump Business and Blogging? Well, can ya punk? Identify a legal small business that could not possibly benefit from blogging. I wonder if anyone can come up with a convincing one.
It’s not quite a thousand million questions, and there’s no knocking at the door, but here’s one last entry in a bumper crop of interrogatively titled posts. Motivation Through Job Enrichment: What Are The Key Components? The Personal Financier has tips, though sometimes I wonder how much of the conventional wisdom is off.
I love the expression “fog sculpting” in a related Trust Matters post: Employee Engagement, Fog Sculpting, and Measuring Love.
Tax Rules Eased for Home-Office Sales, according to Work at Home Business Solutions. Didn’t notice how oddly setup the blog is when I flagged it for inclusion.
On a less positive note, Trader’s Narrative declares We Are In A Recession, with graphs and historical trends to prove it. My perception has been that there has been almost a societal or media wish for a recession, and building the belief in one has been helping it creep ever closer to true. Kind of like causing failure by expecting failure, perhaps tossing in self-sabotage to ensure it, on a societal level. As long as there’s an IT Worker Shortage, or demand for people who know blogging, I ought to be fine.
Is there really a fixed pie and static technological development making economic success in other countries bad for us in more developed countries? That’s what I take away from How The World’s Cheapest Car Is Bad For Your Wallet, in which Living Off Dividends suggests a big downside to the introduction of the seemingly brilliant Tata Motors Nano.
Econbrowser explains in easily followed detail the modern Mortgage securitization process. I had a rough idea how it worked, but nothing so coherent, or that went into how things went awry.
Jim Logan reminds us that simple ideas can be some of the best for increasing sales at little extra cost or effort, yet are easily overlooked. Be sure to read 7 tips to boost profits before you close the box to see how brilliant the obvious can be.
Hire People that are Better than You is one I planned when I saw it to hold out as an example of what I mean by a superlative CotC entry, so it makes sense it came from Nikole at Small Business Essentials. She hosted last week’s edition, which you might want to check out if you missed it. Her post is another “obvious” bit of brilliant advice that people tend to forget, or don’t follow out of fear, misdirected ego, or worse.
Searchlight Crusade sounds on the right track in positing The Future of Real Estate Agency: Expert Consultants, Not Market Access. It’s not easy to maintain a guild these days, or to control information, or to not ideally represent client interests.
That’s it for this edition. What do you think of the selections? I invite you to peruse the more simply presented entries that were excluded, and that were on the fence maybes I didn’t go back and cut one way or another, some of which are probably as good as most of the above.
I wanted to show some of the thought process and perception that goes into making selections, even to the point of reading something on a different day or in a different mood perhaps leading to a different result. Some of the inclusions and exclusions truly are arbitrary, no matter who is hosting or editing.
As mentioned, watch this space for additional announcements, content, and links in between CotC editions.
Have I Mentioned Lately…
To come back later? There’s no way it shouldn’t be up today. Everything is read and more or less selected out of the submissions. I almost stopped yesterday long enough to write a post on how to be summarily excluded. On the other hand, that won’t be quite as relevant going forward?
Why?
If I wrote business-related posts regularly, say one or more a week, I would expect no more than a few per year to make it into CotC. There’s nothing special about most of what I write.
Except… I’d know that and would try to determine which few per year to send in, so a significant portion of what I entered would be included. While I’d like to think I’d be able to tell what’s likely to be that good, if you really can’t tell, so you enter something every week, you have to assume that most of them will be ignored.
It’s time to get over any presumption you might still have that if you enter, you will be included, and that it’s insulting if you aren’t. This is not going to be your blogfather’s CotC anymore.
Here are some easy guidelines, beyond just assuming you should only enter the best of the best:
Don’t have a popup ad or subscription box.
Don’t be marked red by SiteAdvisor.
Don’t be boring. First paragraph or so ought to make me want to keep going.
Don’t cite too much outside text in proportion to yours.
Don’t be a run of the mill how to post.
Especially on a blog that’s obviously there as an obligatory ad revenue generator.
Especially if it’s part of an exclusively interlinked set of such blogs.
Which is not to say nobody should have ads or have groups of blogs.
But it’s usually surprisingly easy to know the ones I mean when you see them.
Don’t get caught plagiarizing.
Don’t be off-topic.
Personal advice is off-topic.
Even if it’s financial in nature.
Unless we’re feeling like making an exception.
Exceptions may be made for excellent posts, or they might be linked outside the CotC proper.
Don’t be old.
Be an actual blog post, though this may change.
Don’t be unable to write.
Don’t be mundane.
Don’t be in a language other than English, sorry.
Don’t give the appearance of being scam or spam connected.
Don’t be disproportionately linky.
Obviously meaning pure link posts are inappropriate.
Probably something I’ve forgotten, but if you’re clear on the rest you’re likely to have a chance of being included.
Okay, back to work.
Update:
I forgot a couple things. One is that video and audio posts may be excluded out of hand, even if exceptions are made sometimes.
Another is the old multiple entries rule. If you are self-submitting, you should have a grasp of what post in the last couple weeks has been outstanding compared to others. Entering five of them from the same blog? You’re just adding work for us and asking for none of them even to be considered.
January 7 CotC at Small Business Essentials
Small Business Essentials presents the January 7 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.
Next week’s host will be Bizosphere. I never heard back from the volunteer for whom I’d have delayed that by a week.
As noted on the CotC mailing list and at least implied elsewhere, CotC will be changing again. The experiment in improving quality while keeping it a traditional blog carnival has failed.
In keeping with that, this may be the last week in which entries are accepted via the Blog Carnival submission form. In keeping with that, and the fact they’ve never been posts may be suggested for inclusion by anyone, not just self-submitted by the blogger in question. For the time being use thecotc@gmail.com for that. Blog posts get precedence, but business articles in other publications will be considered as well.
December 31 CotC at SEO ROI
SEOROI presents the December 31 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists.
Next week’s host will be Small Business Essentials.
I thought I had a host lined up for the January 14 edition, but have not heard back. Stay tuned. There are no hosts scheduled beyond then, and they may or may not be needed in the traditional form Feel free to volunteer, just in case. I have possible major changes firmly in mind for CotC, but that won’t preclude “host” participation to add a distinct flavor each week.
Q-U-A-L-I-T-Y
What part of “quality posts on business and economics” is so confusing?
I went to clean out the Gmail account in preparation for the next edition and, unusually for me, took the liberty of peeking at the fourteen submissions received so far.
They suck.
If I stretched it I might include, say, four of them. Going back and evaluating more closely, I might even include one or two legitimately, but my first impulse on quick review is that none of them fully meet the spirit of excellence that CotC is supposed to embody.
As I contemplate but remain uncertain about changing CotC again, that perusal felt like a nudge in the direction of abandoning the old model.
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