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“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.
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