Archive for February, 2008
“February 26″ Carnival of the Capitalists
Welcome to this week’s “give me a break, I’m busy and hey, you could have volunteered to host” late edition Carnival of the Capitalists. The entries were few, but decent enough. I put most of them in, and they appear in the order received below, followed by selections of my own.
Before I get to those, I’d like to point out that Gautam Ghosh is soliciting entries for the Carnival of Human Resources.
At the risk of making CotC even less relevant by pointing out a good example of one of the ways in which something like CotC has indeed become less relevant in the last 53 months, you might want to check out the Small Business category at Guy Kawasaki’s new Alltop site. It seems pretty cool.
Here’s the part where I have an annoying habit of promoting Deb’s shop, as if you can’t see the colorful pictures and link over to the right, and of promoting the services business, into which we’re working on incorporating, at least, as I recently summarized, “online services, digital coach, virtual assistant, and computer support.” Again with the pretty link on the right, and it’s the hosting sponsor of this place. Not this week. Oh, too late, but wait…
I would also like to point out Naturescape, which belongs to my niece’s husband. They specialize in hardscape construction and associated landscaping in New England, based in Plympton and Middleboro, Massachusetts. They have a cool portfolio. If you’re in the region and in the market, Naturescape is the one. Tell them Jay and Deb sent you.
Now without further unseemly capitalistic commercial interruption, here’s this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists…
Gavin Ingham asks Is there such a thing as a professional salesperson?
Andrew Rondeau is not endorsing, but points out What Every Manager Can Learn From Barack Obama. You can’t take success for granted, and it seems Hillary’s management reflects her having done so.
John Bambenek echoes what I always say about health care and the market, though I was unaware of Ted Kennedy’s role - it figures, in The Health Care Crisis and Why it was Inevitable. I blame the divorce from market forces and choice principally on FDR and LBJ policies and programs, with a bit of AMA thrown in for good measure. Why yes, this is a favorite topic of mine. Assuming it’s not thrown out, and is not forced on the rest of the country by whoever wins in November and the associated menagerie of congresscritters, we are contemplating leaving Massachusetts in response to the absurdity that is RomneyCare.
Warren Wong explains How To Expand Your Business Through Quality And Word Of Mouth.
Matt at Life is your Career recommends Avoiding group think. I love the poster. Meetings: None of Us is a Dumb as All of Us.
“FMF” of Free Money Finance shares an answer he gave to the burning question What Will Happen to the Stock Market in 2008.
Leon Gettler presents an Interview with Brett Curran from Axentis.
Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme presents an explanation and discussion of The efficient market hypothesis.
Scott Allen answers reader mail regarding the always tricky Pre-revenue Company Valuation question. Be warned that there was a popup ad when I went there, as well as a timed survey prompt that briefly blocked the content one time.
Mark at SportsBiz notes far greater implications than you might suspect in New York City to Shutter Off Track Betting.
Wally Bock looks at the Microsoft/Yahoo scenario in What do you get when you cross a gorilla and a donkey?
Tamar Weinberg of Lifehacker discusses how to Manage Your Online Reputation, of relevance to business as well as individuals. There are even people you can hire out there to help you with that sort of thing, if you don’t have staff or time for it yourself.
William J. Holstein believes the economy is in for A Grinding Five-Year Restructuring.
Rob Sama has an excellent new design and has been posting up a storm. Although it technically was written after the deadline for this week and should go in next week, I’m going to point out Housing Bubble and Inflation on Deb’s recommendation. It’s above the normal quota for cited text, but it’s multiple sources of interest he’s tying together and commenting on intelligently. It’s wrong beyond reason to prevent market self-correction.
Sean Silverthorne wonders is The New eBay headed in the Wrong Direction? My reaction? Yeah, just a little, which is why this caught my eye. There’s increasing room for a “not first, but better” competitor to snap up a chunk of the market.
Ilya Somin in an untitled post titled Zoning and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis discusses the economic impact of land use regulations and points in turn to Land-Use Regulation and the Credit Crisis at Cato@Liberty. Since I was old enough to have a reasonable grasp of economics and the Constitution, I have maintained the belief that land use regulations are unconstitutional takings, period, and further, that they would be “unconstitutional,” as it were, even in the absence of ours or any written constitution.
Jason Falls guest posts at Buzz Networker on business applications of Twitter, centered around direct promotional experience with the Baja 1000, in Twitter Me This… And Be Informed.
It’s not a post, but I meant to include Startup hotshots score last week. It’s a profile of the Swan brothers, centered around their recent sale of MyTrade.com.
Also note a post, Chris Anderson at Wired has an article titled Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, which you might find interesting.
Finally, if you are not a regular at BusinessPundit or here between CotC editions, you might have missed Rob May in his last major post, The Top 10 Changes In My Business Thinking, or the post where I linked and opined about it, Top 10 Lessons
That’s it for this week. I am still interested in hosts. I would be interested in hearing arguments in favor of hosts returning to doing so at their own blogs.
Next week will be the last for which I will take entries via the third party submission forms, rather than to bizosphere@gmail.com directly. If it’s good enough to enter, it’s worth paying attention to the actual home of CotC. That said, I’ll put an autoreply in place to let entrants know for the next couple weeks or so.
Carnival of the Capitalists for February 19, 2008
Welcome to this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists.
Please note that I am posting regular content at Bizosphere. It’s not just for CotC anymore. If I can’t get guest hosts regularly, it may soon not be for CotC at all.
Seriously, as in it being too much of a distraction from trying to scratch out money to stay housed, fed, phoned and online before my situation improves enough to shrug off CotC not earning its keep.
Confused about the newfangled, non-carnival CotC? Here is a comprehensive explanation/description. Even if you can’t make it to the end of that, you should see the Political Calculations post that discusses blog carnivals as an early form of social media, which of course would make them obsolete. Not just because of all the options like this for finding content nowadays. Not like when I was a kid and we had to walk forty miles, uphill both ways, through the snow, to blog, let alone find yummy yet obscure business posts by others.
Now that I’ve been a downer and verbose, without even mentioning that we’re selling off books, still accepting but not remotely expecting tipjar donations, selling amazing crochet products (who could resist this baby blanket or these dishcloths that are a favorite in Australia?), selling ads - including here if I don’t get around to deciding to join the Forbes ad network this week, and selling computer and other services (including TBA blog setup and possibly some virtual admin/research), on with this week’s CotC!
Where better to start than with Rob May, who leaves BusinessPundit this week. Someone suggested including From Creationism to Evolution: How the World’s Most Powerful Idea Has Shaped My Thinking About Business, which is certainly worthy. Then via Twitter I noted this item:
Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer interviews CotC co-founder Rob May about his departure from BusinessPundit in Top Business Blogger Calls It Quits. A part two has been promised on the same day this CotC will publish, so look for that even if I don’t update this post with the other link. (Here’s part two.)
Which I now see Rob has also linked. While you’re at it, check out How You Can Finally Make Some Money From Reading This Blog, in which Rob recruits readers to help with marketing, and describes what sounds like a great direction for his business.
Codswollop examines Why it is Not Advertising that is Broken, But Advertisers.
Sales Machine explains How to handle “It Costs Too Much,” of particular interest to me, given my perpetual angst about pricing. As a bonus, the same blog also asks Is Bad Marketing Killing Future Sales?
The Webpreneur wonders Are We Born Entrepreneurs? That sounds about right.
Duct Tape Marketing asks, or rather suggests that you ask, What would you Google if?
At the risk of it being too IT-oriented, and too law firm specific, I thought I would point out the excellent IT v. LT; A Critical Distinction Many Firms Fail to Make from Ross Ipsa Loquitur. It has wider application to other specialties, and to the importance of looking at what you do and how you do it, rather than blindly smacking random bandages on your business technology needs. In a way it’s old hat and simplistic, because it’s what you would do in planning a custom database or software package… but then, too many companies lack the patience or don’t want to go to the apparent added cost of getting it right. No wonder you get rampant IT Project Failures.
Speaking of pricing, An Amazing Mind looks at Why Linux Doesn’t Spread - the Curse of Being Free. Makes sense to me. I a “doesn’t make sense but I know the psychology” sort of way.
It’s not a post, and I haven’t read it myself, but you may be interested in the Intuit Future of Small Business Report.
Frequent past CotC host Scott Allen of the About.com Entrepreneur’s Guide wonders Sex Sells? Oh Really?, about which he says:
“Sex sells,” or so the saying goes. But does it really? Can it be applied to the marketing of any product, or can its use in advertising actually hurt you rather than help you?
From GoDaddy to Unilever, it’s an extensive analysis.
This may seem an odd choice. It’s something Deb pointed out to me. It’s part personal financial advice, part business advice intended for writers, including item 10: “Writing is a business. Act like it.” It’s also more widely applicable to micro/one-man and startup businesses. Excellent author John Scalzi presents Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money.
Dawn Rivers Baker at The Journal Blog has an interesting look at the economy as we’ve known versus may need to know it going forward in Sustainability and the new world order (operators standing by). She says:
Growth economics has pretty much outlived its usefulness and has gotten to the point that it causes people and other entities to do things that make no sense and/or are self-injurious. But if one is going to get rid of growth economics, what do we replace it with? Sustainability.
Which does seem to be the new buzzword. I just wonder if people too often overlook the role of technology, the human mind, and the power of markets - if minimally fettered - in keeping sustainable what sometimes appears not to be.
Dawn’s post was also timely in that it resonated with Deb’s Reality Bucket post We’re barely more than a century removed from the year an entire town in South Dakota nearly starved to death. It’s a similar look at past expectations, who benefits and promotes them, and that perhaps not being able to continue indefinitely, any more than two workers will be able to support one retiree down in Ponziland.
At the risk of including something a bit sale-pitchy and previous content linky, it’s worth remembering that business web sites are for marketing and web designers aren’t necessarily marketers. And so we have TechnoBuzz with Build a Better Website.
SoxFirst brings us Subprime explained - crunch time glossary:
Credit crunch? Credit default swaps? Honeymoon loans? NINJA loans? Negative pledge? The subprime crisis is upon us and investors are confronted with jargon designed to baffle and keep them in the dark. Here is a glossary of key terms you’ll need to know to keep ahead of the game.
Ninja loans? No relation to Ninja Turtles?
Speaking of easier ways to find business content five years on, One Man Band notes a useful business research took in Online Research on the Way to Online Business.
SharpBrains is an interesting blog, and a past host, but doesn’t usually touch directly on business. Brain Training Games: Context, Trends, Questions delves into the significant and growing business of brain fitness training and brain exercise products.
Wally Bock is making sense again, with In it for the long haul.
We say that a CEO’s job is to increase “shareholder value.” But what we really mean is “short term shareholder value.” The difference is pressure to gut the future to produce short term increases in share price.
It’s a serious problem, management by stock market (MBSM, not to be confused with MBWA?). If you’re jumping here and there at every stock price fluctuation, you’re not running the business for the long term, where the true and stable value lies.
Recent host Nikole at Small Business Essentials has something of an advice post I might normally skip, but the problem of managing e-mail effectively is a big one in business. It’s the kind of thing you see regularly at places like Web Worker Daily. It also resonated because, from what she describes in Less, Part 3: The e-mail Diet, we’ve had very similar e-mail volume and filters.
I have several gigabytes of e-mail in Outlook Express on this computer. Since I stopped working for the former large client and brought the old business to an end (mostly; still tying things up), I get considerably less e-mail, but there can still be dozens in a day. One policy I’ve adopted, for now, Blackberry notwithstanding, since I mainly look at that when I am not home, is e-mail doesn’t stay running every moment of the day. I have a Pavlovian reaction to the e-mail indicator, and stopping to see what just arrived can completely derail whatever else I was doing. As I pick up more work, that may not be possible, or I may have e-mail running with just the relevant accounts monitored on one computer, while the rest arrives as invoked on the other computer (the blue one here).
But I digress, and that’s it for this edition. Which I just realized I did not place into categories as it’s been for each of the newfangled editions so far. Oh well. It also took me only three hours or so to put this together based on the entries and some links I’d bookmarked recently. Spread the word, link away, and if you’d like to guest host, by all means e-mail host or jay @ this very domain, or even use the submission address of bizosphere@gmail.com, where I’ll see it the next time I go to see what’s arrived for submissions.
Speaking of submissions, keep them coming to the aforementioned Gmail address, including a link and a brief description. Even if I give up on CotC (or it could become less frequent), I’m likely to draw from links that show up there for inclusion in routine posts here.
Stay tuned for next week’s edition, hosted here by lovely and talented TBA, who also taught many classes when I attended college.
Not Rocket Science: The New CotC
Apparently there is some confusion about how Carnival of the Capitalists has changed in an effort to save it, and perhaps benefit from all the effort I’ve put in over the years.
Preface
Blog carnivals as a concept have run their course, in the original definition.
A well-done periodic collection of quality links is not necessarily obsolete, though it’s easy to find and filter stuff these days, compared to, say, 2003 when CotC started.
Carnival of the Capitalists does have some brand recognition, presumably some value, and some modest no-matter-what following. It had developed a quality problem, and had long been bleeding readers.
The theory was, it was worth saving, but would need to change.
Goals included getting more traffic by staying put and being better, getting built-in traffic by staying put on a site that self-generated traffic, not relying on heavy hitter links each edition, and being able to monetize site traffic that happens to include CotC. More ambitious possibilities included being linked or picked up by a mainstream publication, after stabilizing and growing again.
Changes in Content and Submissions
Submissions through Blog Carnival will be phased out. The official e-mail address is different: bizosphere@gmail.com. Entries are expected to be hand-generated and include a link and a brief description/justification for inclusion. Anyone may enter a great post they liked.
Inclusion or exclusion starts with whether or not it’s on-topic and so forth, but beyond that is completely arbitrary and up to the host, who also hand-picks posts that were not entered. Items that are included, while we encourage the obscure and the might not see otherwise, can include articles or posts from mainstream publications or their adjunct blogs.
Entries are pre-screened by me, so the host only sees the better ones, or ones about which I am on the fence.
Entry cutoff remains 3 PM eastern time Sunday.
On-topic still means the same. Some other elements are technically more flexible, like whether you could submit two posts, or have two included, though the preference would still be for one, and they are expected to be especially compelling.
Changes in Hosting
CotC no longer migrates from blog to blog.
Each host acts as a guest editor, with the post published here.
Hosts get to put their imprint and spin on an edition, and are promoted heavily. So far, a large proportion of out clicks each edition seem to be people checking out the host, so that actually seems to work, for relatively modest values of traffic.
As mentioned, I forward the host pre-screened entries. This is complete by sometime Monday morning, and usually Sunday evening. I forward them regularly during the week.
The publication day is now Tuesday, rather than Monday, allowing longer for the host to finalize an edition and, if needed, locate and include more good links. Plus Monday was too crowded with carnivals and, well, being Monday.
The host logs in directly to this WordPress account and saves the post as a draft.
I review it, tack on an intro or ending as needed, making sure the host has been appropriately credited, publish it and check all the links, fixing as needed any that are wrong, malformed or missing from their anchor text.
I announced it for CotC Twitter followers.
I announce it on the mailing list.
I update the edition lists, past and future.
I no longer update at Blog Carnival, because it’s been changed to not a carnival, except in brand name and as a matter of history and spirit, perhaps.
Finally
My big concern centered on whether it would be worthwhile for people to host, and whether I would attract any hosts. I believe the answers so far have been “reasonably so” and “not really any harder than it had become under the floating carnival model.” It’s just that it had become challenging.
I’m not so concerned about attracting entries, because we are less reliant on and less likely to use them, and instead of random blogs, it’s always on a known quantity blog of decent page rank (the only PR5 I have that isn’t a retired blog). Entries may be excluded freely, but it’s more meaningful when they are included. There has been a reduction, because people mostly failed to follow along when I changed things, and are less prone to drive-by submissions on Blog Carnival when no new upcoming edition has been listed. The overall quality of what we get has improved.
I’d like to keep it going, even with a continued few hours of work a week involved. It’s just that doing the entire thing myself adds to the time involved, and it’s reaching a tipping point. If the new concept doesn’t attract guest hosts most weeks, it’s going to have to end, or become an irregular feature by the same name at this blog.
Are there any questions I didn’t answer?
Update:
Political Calculations has a great discussion of blog carnivals as an early form of social media. I couldn’t have said it better. Included is a comparison between the current traffic charts and Ironman’s CotC traffic experience back in 2005.
Carnival of the Capitalists for February 12, 2008
Welcome to this week’s CotC. I will update the intro when my power comes back, but thought I’d publish Barbara’s draft via my Blackberry. Here it is… That was fun.
This edition is hosted by Barbara Payne, who tells you more about herself at the end of the post.
Unless I get a volunteer, it appears the next edition will be hosted by me. All subsequent editions are open as well. Jay @ this domain or host @ this domain if you’d like to see your name in lights. Well, see your name here, anyway.
Here’s Barbara’s Carnival of the Capitalists:
Meandering over the business/marketing landscape is particularly rewarding when you have so many savvy, insightful observers to guide you. It’s a pleasure to serve as the CofC editor for this session-thanks, Jay, for the opportunity to share in the fun.
PR and the big guys
Nowadays they spend $20 million per campaign. But back then, Nike was struggling with ads and branding that just didn’t hang together. They were addressing everyone in sports, from runners to superathletes, and wanted a one-phrase-does-it-all tagline.
Turns out, “Just Do It” was a throwaway line. But audiences fell in love with that and the swoosh. Nike started getting letters from people who weren’t even in sports saying it had saved their emotional health. Read Mark-the-attorney’s blog about their latest PR campaign-and the video they introduced on CNBC Tuesday night.
Internet dominance - will Microsoft-cum-Yahoo bring Google down off the online throne?
Deb presents a well-reasoned look-she sounds like a savvy insider-at what the battle of the giants has to do with you and me. What Does The Yahoo/Microsoft Debate Mean For The Rest Of Us? posted at Marketvise.
Getting found online - by people in your neighborhood
More on Google versus Yahoo-One Man Band writes this article that describes steps to take to improve your business’s visibility in local search by comparing Google’s Local Business with Yahoo’s Local Basic. Get found by reading Supercharging Local Search.
How NOT to sell to women
It’s always gratifying to see the ad people called on the carpet for work they produce that’s in poor taste or even downright insulting. Yes, many women are extraordinarily body-conscious, but they’re usually not focused on their chest (unless it’s to want it bigger). So who is a blouse-button-popping commercial entertaining?
As Yvonne DiVita suggests, makes you wonder where these people have been for the last two decades. Yvonne says vote with your money-don’t buy Special K. Yvonne’s LipSticking blog presents a highly reasonable rant against using misrepresentations and sexual innuendo to sell cereal as diet food.
Winning online by being first
You’ve heard of Digg. Ever wonder how it got started and what it’s doing now? Chris Harris writes about how the two founders put Digg far ahead of its competitors by outsourcing their service work-which supposedly helped them “get there first.” I don’t know whether that’s always a sound strategy. There are a lot of winner companies out there that let someone else invent it, and then “borrowed” the idea and found a way to do it better-faster-cheaper. Anyway, check out this outsourcing-improves-time-to-market post
Speaking of outsourcing…how’s free trade doing?
Jordan Ballor presents a lengthy (for a blog) look at how globalization is affecting both the US and the world-and concludes that the US is getting the short end of the stick, but that we could still do more to help the poor in developing countries. Economists are People Too posted at Acton Institute PowerBlog.
While you’re at it (if you’re into this sort of thing), check out The Library of Economics and Liberty’s definition of income redistribution. Interesting. And here is Manuel Lora, a Cornell University TV and multimedia producer, writing on the topic “Income Redistribution Is Not Charity.”
Small business finance-What do VCs really want?
C. Worrall talks about what it takes to “do your due”-Venture Capital Due Diligence posted at CFO Yourself.
HR - Before you VC, make sure you’re not bleeding money internally
If you tend to be a trusting soul-and many entrepreneurs who’ve finally learned to delegate a task find they want to really wash their hands of it-beware of taking your eyes completely off the process.
Erica presents Protect Your Small Business from Embezzling Bookkeepers Part 1: Checking Account Savvy posted at American Consumer News.
Last but not least, technology
Anita Campbell has a true story and a solution for the latest rather nasty hacking attacks on WordPress and other blogs. She says this threat affects bloggers and small business owners. Read her story on “Hacking-that could never happen to my site-famous last words.”
Your editor, Barbara Payne, publishes several blogs-though some get more of her attention than others. They reflect my widely varying interests and commitments. In BioMedNews.org I look at developments in bioscience and the scientific/medical industries and give my two cents on what they might imply or lead to. In Blog for Business and Get More Customers (my newsletter), I share information from business/marketing experts and insights from my own experiences as a marketing consultant/copywriter.
And in the SWWAN blog, I express my views on life for women, particularly single working women, in our society and our world. You can also listen to or download interviews and commentary on fascinating topics on the SWWAN Dive Internet radio show. Here we archive our podcasts on a broad range of subjects-everything from what it really takes to get a business loan to how to use pictures to get yourself unstuck and moving forward in your life.
Good visiting with you. Please feel free to comment on any or all.
Barbara Payne
That’s it for this week. Note that I have started posting regularly here, if only in the form of reposts so far. Partners, Friends, and Uncommon Goals and Business Lessons From Gilmore Girls were the first two. This is an effort to take the site away from being merely the administrative or even weekly hosting home of CotC, and toward being a destination itself. If the blog gets more traffic, CotC entries should get more pass through traffic, even without linkage from many or high volume blogs.
On the capitalistic front, in addition to my business and Deb’s Neatly Tangled Shop I’ve mentioned ad nauseum, we’re selling of books via a Half.com shop.
Thank you for linking and visiting Bizosphere and Carnival of the Capitalists.
Carnival of the Capitalists for February 5, 2008
This week’s guest host of the Carnival of The Capitalists is the blogger commonly known by the pen (keyboard?) name of Jay Solo, primarily from Dispatches from Blogblivion. He also posts when he gets around to it at some of the other blogs listed over on the right, and at the blog associated with Welcome to Help, which provides the hosting for this site, and where he offers digital coaching, tech support, and on-site computer work based from Middleboro, in southeastern Massachusetts. He’s looking for other work to piece together a living, ideally in somewhat of a web worker style. More about that at the end of the post.
As you may know, Jay is co-founder of Carnival of the Capitalists, running with co-founder Rob May’s great idea in 2003, the year we both started blogging. Rob’s original BusinessPundit blog will soon change hands. Sounds like it will remain well worth reading, while you can continue to check what Rob has to say at Coconut Headsets, and admire his work at Daily Idea. He doesn’t have an entry in this week’s edition, but you may want to check out 30 Good Posts You May Have Missed: A History of Businesspundit, inspired by his upcoming departure and the fact that many people weren’t reading him back when.
Now that I have proven once again that I cannot write a terse introduction, let’s get on with…
Jay’s Carnival of The Capitalists:
One more note. You can now follow CotC on Twitter. I’ll tweet each edition there, along with a limited amount of admin stuff like who is hosting next, call for hosts, call for entries, site outages, that sort of thing. It’s a slightly more active alternative to the CotC mailing list.
Pick of the Litter:
Wally Bock has probably the best post I have seen on Microsoft and Yahoo, including details of Yahoo’s history as an accidental business. He concludes And the winner is… Google. See the very last entry in the list for more blast from the dotcom past.
Small Business & Entrepreneurship:
Customers are cash-strapped, the Fed rate is crashing and investors are calling for yet more rate cuts. What’s a small business person to do? One Man Band offers suggestions in Tight Credit, Consumers and the One-Man Band.
People seem to like lists, so Virtual Hosting Blog has you covered with 101 Unconventional Sources for Entrepreneurial Funding.
Big Business Management:
Paul Conley explains why you want your company’s recruiters to be web savvy in Changing just one mind. Acronym soup hits close to home, in that I know people looking for programming and other technical jobs run into just that kind of cluelessness, or lack of understanding about what they are specifying. Like advertising in 1996 for someone with ten years Visual Basic experience. Hardly, since in 1986 “Ruby” was at best a gleam in Alan Cooper’s eye. But I digress, and you’re never going to eliminate all of that, but improvement? Plenty of room.
Memo to Andy Grove: Big Companies Aren’t Disruptors. That’s from William C. Taylor at Xconomy, whole also notes the transformative potential of near death.
Markets, Investing & Taxes:
Société Générale had pathetic risk controls, according to innovation Creators. That sounds right. How do you not notice a 7.2 billion dollar loss in progress?
Economics and Such:
Over at Queercents Bill Long asks an excellent question: Could the Stimulus Package Hurt You? Government mucking about with the economy like so many raging china shop bovines? Naw, it won’t hurt a bit…
Feast on the lessons of Lunchtime Economics from The Club For Growth.
While we’re pondering questions, how about: Are there lessons for free banking in the Second Life Fiasco? Can we learn something from an unregulated economic event in a virtual world? Angus ponders at Kids Prefer Cheese.
Marketing and Social Networking:
Chris Webb notes the potential of community and fanatics in Scrabblegate- Hasbro’s Missed Facebook Opportunity.
Stephen Dean thinks we should Stop Assuming So Much, applicable to copywriting, marketing and economics.
This is an interlinked two-for with a useful point for businesses and their brand names: Capture your names in social media environments to avoid any possible confusion. Really, it’s a bit like trying to be first to your corresponding names on the web. In this case, Seth Godin reacts to his “presence” on Twitter in Not Seth Godin. That was inspired by Darren Rowse asking him and posting When Seth Godin isn’t Seth Godin. This was of particular interest to me, since I follow “Seth Godin” on Twitter, and while there are many obviously spoof accounts, and while Seth’s tweets are obviously automated blog post notifications, I had not worked out that it was not something Seth had setup himself.
If you are going to jump into marketing via social network environments, Chris Brogan has advice in Marketers in a Social Network World.
DR4WARD asks the burning question Did Rambo Hijack the Super Bowl? Then he goes on to explain the concept of ambush marketing of the sort he suspected.
When Clients Don’t Follow Your System the result is something called “desire lines,” according to Robert Gerrish of Aussie Rules, a new BNET blog. Don’t recognize the term? You will.
Hard to Classify:
Back from the dead. CenterNetworks notes The Industry Standard Is Back as an Online Content Offering Plus Prediction Market. I used to like the magazine, though not as much as I liked Business 2.0 around the same timeframe.
Fast Company Expert Keith Ferrazzi encourages the practice of Birthday Pinging. This resonated with my habit of posting birthday wishes at Blogblivion, with the birthday category being one of the biggest due to the number of them I’ve accumulated.
CNET News Blog was inspired by the Microsoft bid for Yahoo to take a look back with Dot-com pioneers–where are they now?.
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.
Next week’s host will be Barbara Payne, who should be, well, really good.
As handy as it is to be able to self-promote directly through an edition, and as fun as it was to find interesting material to add to the mix this week, I want to give others a shot at hosting most of the time. It adds varying spin and voice, rather than it getting stale.
Since the post goes here, you don’t even have to be a blogger yourself, though it’s beneficial to you to have something online you’d like to subject to shameless self-promotion. It’s also something you can point to as a cool thing you did.
If you’d like to host, or have questions about doing so that are unanswered here, e-mail host @ this domain. The next available edition’s publication date is February 19, and each week afterward is also available.
The rest of this is going to be primarily shameless self-promotion and an attempt to generate sorely needed income after my self-made paternity leave run amuck, so you might want to leave while you still can…
I already mentioned the business at the top. We’re trying to piece together an income immediate enough that we’ll no longer be windmilling our arms and suffering vertigo as we glimpse into the abyss, and growing enough to well and truly recover and never be there again. That, and we’d prefer to have a diversity of income sources, even if one of them is full time, traditional or flexibly home-based.
Besides any of the tech support, digital coaching, and other more traditional geek work that I can do, I would be interested in blogging-related work. As much administrative, managerial, editorial, promotional or consulting as actual writing. I have a blogging and management oriented resume linked at my resume page, and my LinkedIn profile has extensive information only moderately in need of updating. I even caved in and added a profile picture there, from January 2004 in Las Vegas. In both cases, don’t be surprised to see my real name, rather than my nom de blog.
Deb is interested in work she can do, probably less than full time, from home, bonus if it’s flexible or late night. Before moving to Massachusetts, she did administrative and dispatch work. Besides being as much of a prospect for blog work as I am, she could do virtual admin or customer service. Well, I may be to forward, mentioning it, but we discussed the possibility. As you probably know if you’re a CotC regular, she runs a successful Etsy shop called Neatly Tangled, for which there is an associated blog. While it’s only supplemental, it helps, and she makes fantastic stuff. The shop has inspired many discussions of business between us, some of which would have made great posts.
We need the money and have too much stuff, so to kick off getting rid of some of it, we’re having a book sale. It currently consists of pregnancy, birth, and parenting books for sale, but any more that appear will be in the books for sale category. Not sure how far that will go, as there are other options for selling books off more efficiently, but we’ll try to offer some to readers first.
We’ve done some advertising on retired blogs and Blogblivion, and will probably add more. For this site I am trying to hold out for something better than link ads, even if they pay as much and more promptly. That may mean joining the Forbes ad network, but I thought I’d mention it in case anyone has a better idea or would be interested in some form of sponsorship beyond the “sponsorship” of hosting the site under my own business web hosting.
I feel like I’m forgetting something, but I need to get this posted and announced while it’s still Tuesday. Be sure to come on by next week for Barbara Payne’s edition.
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