Bizosphere

Archive for March, 2007

Political Calculations presents the March 26 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists. Looks like 28 entries, which may seem like a lot, but that’s the best of something like 54 submissions. Check it out for some excellent reading.

Next week’s host will be Business Pundit.

Dispatches from Blogblivion presents the March 19 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists. Sorry for the delay in announcing it. Blogblivion was down part of yesterday, so I didn’t want to post this then. It may still be sluggish, due to an unusual amount of traffic at a site hosted on the same server.

As noted in the CotC post itself, we’re looking for hosts, though the need is less urgent than when I posted that. Looks like the March 26 edition will be hosted at Political Calculations. April 2 will be hosted at BusinessPundit, and April 9 at Show Me The Money. I’m going to offer April 16 and 23 to a couple of existing volunteers, which could mean May 7 as the next available slot, since April 30 is at The Integrative Stream. Woohoo! Well, for me, that is, as then I don’t have to fret about where my next host is coming from.

Small Business Trends presents the March 12 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists. It’s the best of a bumper crop of entries this week. Be sure to check it out.

There is one more Q&A question carried over from last week at Capital Commerce, a U.S. News & World Report blog by James Pethokoukis. It’s my own submission, asking about the controversial 2005 bankruptcy law, and can be found in the post:

If you missed them, previous entries in the series were:

We got some huge traffic from a couple of the Q&A posts, between one of them getting the attention of Instapundit, and a couple of them being picked up by Yahoo! as business news articles. Conversely, it looks like we generated plenty of out clicks back to James. All in all a great experiment.

Which brings me to another experiment. Last week I announced the idea of a featured mainstream business media article:

There is something new we’re going to try: A featured mainstream business media article.

Submit a link and brief description of your favorite article of the last week or so from the online version of a more traditional, non-blog publication. We’ll select one to highlight in CotC and/or here, and attempt to notify the author or powers that be at the publication that the article has been chosen. The details will be subject to change, as this is an entirely new idea, a few days old. Submission deadline will be end of the day each Friday.

Send article submissions to bizosphere -at- gmail -dot- com.

Since there were no submissions, there is no new feature, at least not this week. Anyone?

Next week’s CotC will be hosted by me, unless anyone gives me a really compelling offer to host. That would make it an especially good time to start the aforementioned new feature.

Welcome to the March 5, 2007 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists, which unfortunately I am throwing together as fast as I can this morning. I’ve read the entries and flagged them yes or no, and I may reconsider some of the yes ones. This quality control thing is tough, because if I really applied it, there might be under ten entries, and some of what was excluded as off-topic is better and more compelling to read than anything included. Anyway, I was occupied yesterday and unable even to begin to compile it then as I would normally do.

There is something new we’re going to try: A featured mainstream business media article.

Submit a link and brief description of your favorite article of the last week or so from the online version of a more traditional, non-blog publication. We’ll select one to highlight in CotC and/or here, and attempt to notify the author or powers that be at the publication that the article has been chosen. The details will be subject to change, as this is an entirely new idea, a few days old. Submission deadline will be end of the day each Friday.

Send article submissions to bizosphere -at- gmail -dot- com.

Speaking of mainstream, last week’s Q&A with James Pethokoukis of the U.S. News & World Report blog Capital Commerce went great, generating tremendous traffic here and for the participating bloggers. James will continue this week, as covering other news took precedence. The three parts so far:

Anyway, on with the show, again in the order received.

One Man Band specializes in advice for increasingly common businesses of one person. I can relate both to that, and to Lights Out - The Significance of a Single Point of Failure. I pointedly maintain e-mail addresses that are not through my web host, and expect eventually to use a separate web host for alternate sites. One way I cope with potential e-mail outages, since clients primarily contact me via e-mail, is to have a passworded web page with an emregeny contact/problem report form that e-mails several addresses, including multiple of my domains, Gmail, Mindspring, Verizon, cell and Blackberry addresses. That’s a bit extreme, yet at the same time it has the weakness of being subject to the web hosting going down. Not to mention a different weakness; people forgetting it exists because the need for it would be so rare. But I digress, and if I spent this much time on each entry, I’d take all day to finish, even without the kids “helping.”

Disorganizational Behavior highlights the importance of organizational success in Individual vs Organization Success.

InsureBlog notes the importance of Profit Motive in the insurance industry, and the destructiveness of forcing insurers to pay extra-contractual claims.

The Digerati Life asks What Do You Make Of A Stock Market Sell Off? Analysis ensues.

Searchligh Crusade talks subprime loan industry in It Not Only Rolls Downhill, It’s Starting to Cascade. This is one I looked at three times as an undecided before giving in, due to the sheer volume of cited to original text. However, the apparent meltdown-to-be of the industry seems to be of particular interest currently, and could be fun economically.

Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog examines Lessons from JetBlue’s Valentine’s Day Debacle. What if you had to handle a “critical incident” in your business?

BusinessPundit exemplifies what we are talking about when we seek quality entries for CotC, in A Startup Idea Postmortem: Proof That Good Ideas Aren’t Always Good Business. Not the length, necessarily, but the subject, substantiveness, and readability.

Small Biz Survival presents Startup: Resources to get from Idea to In Business. On the surface this seems a bit of a laundry list close to those that get excluded, but there’s some potentially useful information here for the would-be business launcher. This is one I looked at a couple times before deciding to include it, as it doesn’t really fit what we’re looking for in CotC. Lists are easy. Thoughtful, detailed discussions of individual things like leveraging chambers of commerce, not so much, but potentially much more interesting.

Breaking the Shackles of the 9 to 5 follows the recent market turmoil with How to Survive Getting Hit by a BRIC, which is particularly interesting for its discussion of business logistics and trucking in China.

The New Business World discusses outsourcing of various HR-related functions in How and What to Outsource: Human Resources.

Cold Spring Shops presses one of my hotbuttons with what might normally be a post excluded for excessive quoted text: Emergence. Ultimately it’s about children discovering property rights, creating spontaneous order, and learning about economics through a Lego game, twisted by teachers to more communistic ends. This goes back to an earlier post, a TCS article, Betsy’s Page, Joanne Jacobs (one of the first two or three bloggers I ever read), and Bizzy Blog, which has the original case study. Fascinating stuff.

Personal Finance Advice has an example of just how creative business ideas can get, in The Coin Man - Pay For Your College Education With Other People’s Change.

Blog Business World talks about treating a downturn as an opportunity with Recession Marketing: Winning Market Share.

Econbrowser is on Recession Watch.

Photon Courier, appropriately, talks about Light Bulbs — The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. GE has developed much improved bulbs, and they should get even better, so what does this say about regulation that might kill such innovation?

Jim Logan explore The Big Picture of Creating a Fast Flowing Stream of B2B Sales Leads.

The RE Forum likes Innovative Marketing Ideas, and describes a great one in which a woman literally gave away her retail store.

All About the Money says to be a great recruiter, leading to greater market share, you need to be a Guerilla Recruiter.

Small Business Trends, where Anita Campbell will host next week’s CotC, features Andy Birol with Five Mistakes When Selling to Small Business Owners. You can add to the text of the post itself by listening to an associated podcast, or reading the transcript of same.

So there you have it; 19 entries, in the order received (except the last two so I’d be mentioning Anita hosting next week last), out of 34 total. That’s 10 fewer entries than last week, yet only 3 fewer included posts. That seems like a good sign.

As I said last week, if an entry was not included, it would have been for some combination of:

We’re looking for the best business and economics posts each week. Submit excellence.

I’ve received 15 entries so far for the March 5th edition.

Four were easy to flag no.

Five were a ready yes.

Six are waiting for a second look, and are likely to be about 50/50, though I find myself thinking that whether a given one goes in might depend on overall volume. It is telling that most of the maybes were received early, when there was less to compare them to.

Remember that a post consisting essentially of a list of links or a pointer elsewhere, self-referential or otherwise, doesn’t qualify.

Update:

Make that 16 received. Six are now flagged yes. Two are undecided but leaning no. Eight are flagged no. It’s practically Hollywood Week here at CotC.

Welcome! If you’re here via U.S. News & World Report or Yahoo, you’ll want to scroll down tho the February 26 edition of Carnival of the Capitalists for a collection of links to good stuff.

If you’d like more, besides checking back here next week, here is a list of every previous edition, starting in October of 2003, oldest to newest. Some aren’t there anymore, but many of them are, and certainly you’d want to catch the most recent ones. For instance, the February 19 edition was hosted at SimplifyThis. Enjoy!

The third Carnival of the Capitalists Q&A question with James Pethokoukis of the U.S. News & World Report blog Capital Commerce is up, as part of a post that says Don’t Use the Market to Predict a Recession. It features a question from Brian Gongol, longtime CotC participant and supporter and creator of the Gongol submission form, on prospects for greater use of government inducement prizes for innovation.

See also question 1 and question 2.