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Accidental Verbosity

Monday, December 31st, 2012

I don’t always blog, about business, economics, or otherwise.

But when I do, these days it’s usually at Accidental Verbosity.

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We’re All Business Bloggers Now

Saturday, January 2nd, 2010

I’ve been wanting to kick of my return to blogging here - but with posts of substance rather than the CotC stuff now elsewhere - with a post observing/opining that business blogging is not only not unusual or niche anymore, but that it’s rampant in this economy or lack thereof.

The boundaries between political and business/economics blogging has also blurred further. Again, the circumstances we are in make it inevitable. Government always affects the business and economic climate and activities, if seldom so negatively, and whether it ought to or not. That’s shown up in my selections for what now passes for CotC.

At any rate, it sometimes feels as if anything I can add or opine here would be superfluous, and perhaps there won’t be much or often, but the itch is getting more intense. Time to scratch it.

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Carnival of the Capitalists for 2009-06-01

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Powered by Twitter Tools.

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Carnival of the Capitalists for 2009-05-18

Monday, May 18th, 2009

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CotC Relaunch!

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Carnival of the Capitalists went on hiatus almost a year ago, and I had not really expected it to return, much as I often missed it. What a year to skip, too, on the topics of business and economics.

I’ve discussed restarting it, here and elsewhere, perhaps with a different official headquarters, but had not pursued it. Then I had an idea that reinvents it and enforces brevity in the time I devote to it.

I have been using Twitter heavily, substantially overlapping what I might otherwise emit via blogging, while going beyond it. Long ago I started a Twitter account for CotC, which mostly lay fallow as did CotC itself.

So… Each entry in a weekly edition of Carnival of the Capitalists will be a tweet in CotC on Twitter. A digest of those will publish here weekly via Twitter Tools, so you may see the collection as a single post at one time. You may also follow CotC from your Twitter account to see the component link entries as they happen, or you may check the CotC Twitter page to peruse them.

I figure a description and automatically shortened URL should not need more than 140 characters. Keeping it there, I can’t be verbose and the carnival won’t be an outrageous time sink. If I want to write longer posts aside from CotC, that’s my problem. I’d like to think you’ll see some appear here, once I get back into the groove.

And entering? You may e-mail the traditional way, thecotc@gmail.com, but you may also direct an @ reply on Twitter to @CotC followed by your link and an associated text. If you enter via Blog Carnival, it goes to the e-mail address, and you may find that convenient.

Topics? Haven’t changed. I would love to see a bit more on the philosophical side, and I expect entries to swirl around recent and current financial, economic and business events. This is the business and economics carnival. That’s a huge range. In general, all the old information on this site is obsolete or superceded, but relevant topics remain so.

You don’t have to be the author to submit. Blog posts are preferred, but especially good mainstream articles will be considered. Substantive and original are still preferred, but exceptions are not out of the question.

Submissions will not automatically be included, or included in the week that by rights they ought to have been in.

The weekly CotC post should publish Monday morning, automatically, ready or not, with whatever I have gotten into tweets during the week. The first will be Monday, January 12, 2009, and will be largely experimental, a beta if you will, since I have not tested the weekly digest function yet, and am a bit late announcing this.

Will it fly? I’d like to think it’s a good time for this sort of thing, done in a way that breaks with the past. I’d like to think that adding Twitter to the mix will expand the audience and generate some excitement.

Here goes…

Posted in Administrivia, Blogging, Business, CotC, Economics | 4 Comments » | Read more..

That Went Well

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Obviously I did not come roaring back with a big “back from hiatus” CotC, doubling as a fundraiser, which was to tell me how interested people were in CotC and whether to continue it or not, whether or not to open this site up to ads as I would avoid with enough reader support, and specifically help me pay my gas & electric arrears to keep them from being shut off August 20, rendering us homeless when we’re otherwise largely stabilized.

In keeping with the preceding, if you ever appreciated Carnival of the Capitalists and/or would like to see it return, or would simply like to be charitable, feel free to hit the PayPal donation button over on the right. Anything I receive will go to the utilities until no more is needed for that. It’s for sure there will be no return of CotC in any form if I am camping on someone’s couch, or camping more literally.

There also hasn’t been a post in answer to the question posed in the comments about Blog Carnival, which I expect to return to using officially (submissions through it still get to the right place) if there is going to be a return of CotC.

There haven’t even been plain old posts, not even quick links, as I’d intended to do regularly. The trouble with quick links is what if those are good ones for an edition of CotC and I “waste them” as regular posts. Or vice-versa. I could post a ton of stuff, if not timely, from all the links I bookmarked toward the assumption I’d do a CotC Real Soon Now… if I can find them after a couple of computer reorganizations.

It seems lame to me that the family kept me so busy that any of the activities I had in mind to help keep the family housed and together were neglected or somehow viewed as less important than, I dunno, whatever would somehow keep things together, and the routine family maintenance. It’s no accident that I am typing this at 2 AM, somehow actually awake and coherent enough, for which I’ll pay later.

Will there be a CotC? Maybe. Definitely, if there’s an outpouring enough to make me insist on the time for it. Will there be posts? Probably, especially if there’s not a CotC, especially if I end up with ads that make it worthwhile for me to squeeze in time for a bit of content. Especially since it’s not exactly tough to generate that, if I make a point of it and start by mining what’s already accumulated. Especially since we live in fascinating economic times I itch to say more about.

So watch this space and I’ll try to be back soon. Heck, if you donate enough and would like me to write about a topic, perhaps that could be arranged…

Posted in Administrivia, Blogging, CotC | 1 Comment » | Read more..

So…

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Does anyone actually care whether I get around to doing a post full of links and calling it Carnival of the Capitalists this week? Really?

There were a few entries and I plan to do one, but it’s been… interesting. Not sure when it will be up, but I’m not feeling too enthusiastic just now. More worried about other things.

Posted in Administrivia, Blogging, CotC | 1 Comment » | Read more..

Top 10 Lessons

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Don’t miss Rob May’s final post as owner of BusinessPundit as controlled by Creative Weblogging: The Top 10 Changes In My Business Thinking.

Perhaps the most important one that I have learned yet still have trouble engaging is number 6, Do Stuff. This applies to looking for funding versus pursuing business activity that won’t depend on funding, right down to the business of daily life.

I think I learned plan and worry and undecide from my father. At the same time, he could make what appeared to be snap decisions about major things, as I often do, while agonizing for an hour about what to have for supper. In my case, probably his, those snap decisions are usually the product of much thought behind the scenes, or are more obviously logical and easy to make than they might appear to others.

Take the business that hosts this blog and thereby “sponsors” Carnival of the Capitalists. I had the basic idea sometime prior to October 1996 (oops, keep doing that) 2006, because in October I will have had the Blackberry for two years, and getting that was associated with the concept. I was stuck in a business partnership that was effectively just me, but if I fired things up, getting more work and making more money, partners who contributed nothing would profit. I was stuck with a large client that produced not enough to live well on, while being the 800 lb gorilla that could tie me up for days, call me in for an emergency at any time, and generally made it difficult to do anything substantive besides. I’m kicking myself for not pursuing harder a side income from blogging at the time, or other more passive income that would fit around what I was doing.

To be more responsive to them while trying to get side work as me, not the partnership, and be able to access e-mail anywhere, as well as have a better cell phone, I decided to get the Blackberry. It’s not quite my mental image of what I’d carry to be portable, but it would be a start.

I agonized over a name. I bought dozens of domains appropriate to the original name, which I was never fully comfortable with for the services in mind. It was last spring I realized a catch phrase I had created would make a better name, found the domain available, grabbed it and dropped the old name even as I had a site under construction because it was about damn time after fiddling for a year.

By that time the inevitable divorce with the large client and the partners was well underway, but then I agonized over whether to push that, get a job after things were settled enough, or what. I also wanted things to be both well settled and not to take off seriously until after the baby arrived.

Yet with the type of work - or side work even if I got a job - it would not have hurt anything to have gone around and said “hey, I am doing X and you can reach me here if you’re interested.” It was, frankly, stupid not to push it along hard, even if I wasn’t sure it was exactly what I wanted, even if I was shell shocked from being in business and dealing with that kind of thing, while not over being shall shocked from dealing with crazy employers and the logical kind of work I might still end up doing there. Momentum is everything.

His number 1 point is one I have recently realized is particularly important, along with number 3, though in my case staying angry rather than being vengeful. Well, no, I still stay angry, resentful, or hold onto earlier impressions, but I at least recognize it can be silly or counterproductive.

There’s more. I could write multiple posts, sparked by the one, depending exactly how frank I wanted to be. You should go read and ponder yourself, while I try to keep reminding myself “the perfect is the enemy of the good” to help me do instead of plan, refine and worry.

Posted in Blogging, Business, Psychology, Work | 1 Comment » | Read more..

Shameless Recycling

Friday, February 8th, 2008

As some of you know, I am in need of work, and would be particularly interested in streams of income that can be done from anywhere, be that full time or near it, or a bit of this and that to help us flesh out and grow beyond “stay in food and housing.” I haven’t posted here the way I’d intended when changing things around, in part because that doesn’t inherently keep the landlord happy and FiOS on, though building that up helps toward the future. Thus all the self-promotion in the last CotC, the donation button for anyone who’s ever appreciated CotC enough to toss in a couple bucks, the embed from Deb’s Etsy shop, books for sale not previously noted here, and the link button for my computer services/support/digital coaching.

But that is not what this post is about.

The possibility of my writing business posts for hire has come up. As had the possibility of my managing a suite of business blogs. For the latter, they really preferred I move across the country, seemed managerially and philosophically very old media/non-internet, I didn’t have my blogging resume in a reasonably timeframe (it was flattering and completely unexpected), and frankly I wasn’t sure how the operation could be improved (without seeing it from the inside), apart from acting more a part of the blogosphere and adding to the suite of blogs. For the former, I hadn’t yet settled on a price and rounded up suitable posts as examples. I would presumably need that for any paid blogging.

The combination of having fretted about needing to dredge up and examine what business-related posts I’ve done over the years (I’m eclectic and that’s not a major topic for me, overall, at least not in the form I’d highlight to people), my former partner annoying me, and the desire to post something here gave me an idea. I’d been thinking I’d do some basic link posts here between CotC editions, but… since the highlight of the place is the weekly link posts, isn’t it kind of weird doing interim ones that aren’t going into CotC? On the other hand, there’s no reason some of them couldn’t also appear in CotC if the host saw them here and picked up on them. I’d also been thinking to do more serious posts, associated with or inspired by links or not, but that’s a time thing right now. I regret having not created the suite of blogs with various focuses three or four years ago, as even a slow build would have meant something by now. Regrets don’t buy diapers.

So what I am going to attempt to do is repost, edited, annotated, or unchanged, any good business (and economics, of which there are probably more) posts I dig up, without getting too carried away, here on this blog for which that is the focus. Stay tuned for that, and perhaps it will give you more reason to return between CotC editions. Not to mention building more inherent traffic that might have missed CotC. That’s more reliable in the long run than relying on links out and about, though I surely appreciate those.

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Five Years On

Thursday, January 24th, 2008

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.

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