Bizosphere

Archive for January, 2008

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
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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
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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.

The About page has been updated to reflect the history and changes. The other informational CotC pages have yet to be changed where relevant.

I’ve combined the past CotC 1.0 and 2.0 pages into one list of past editions, with bookmark navigation among the years. This may eventually be modified further.

I got rid of the annoying crosshair cursor the theme used for hovering over links.

It came out goofy looking, pending further adjustment, but I removed one of the two sidebars on the right, at least for now. It was at least as goofy to have the sidebar content duplicated.

I’ll be rewriting and probably consolidating the other pages associated with CotC.

I have a host for the upcoming edition, and for next week.

Currently the hosts seek out and write up links to excellent posts of interest they find and select, combining them with any entries they select from those forwarded after I prescreen. The Sunday cutoff and Tuesday publication schedule gives an entire day, Monday, for the dust to clear and the edition to be finalized for me to publish here.

I’ve created an account here I may use to have the hosts publish their own edition when it’s ready.

All of this is a work in progress and could change.

I am experimenting with a theme I downloaded, rather than continuing to tweak one of my own.

I like it, in general, but it looks strange with the redundant extra column on the right. Presumably that will be used for something else, once I tweak it.

What do you think? Assuming I haven’t changed it back, or to something else, by the time you see this.

Update:
I don’t like the dual right columns; not if there’s nothing to fill them yet. I like the theme fairly well otherwise, and have no problem with needing to limit the number of pages across the top.

I’ll have to peruse more themes, but otherwise maybe I’ll just modify it. Accidentally did that last night when I uploaded the wrong sidebar.php.

Update 2:
Edited the existing page names to be shorter and not spill over across the top.

I’ve played with Google Reader and Sage somewhat, but always reverted back to following a limited number of bookmarks or blogroll links. Lately some has come through Twitter, which as someone observed can function as a somewhat filtered or recommendation driven feed.

To do what I intend here, and to be more efficient and less overwhelmed by surfing, so it’s back to feed reading in some form.

Any recommendations? My default was going to be to cleanup and expand on my Sage selections. I also downloaded but have not installed Feed Demon.

A review copy of Bounce! It’s the new book by Barry Moltz.

I don’t have a great history of reading and reviewing books sent to me for the purpose.

Rob sent me More Space, which Deb read a lot of and enjoyed, but I stopped reading when I hit a dull chapter, then never picked it up again. No excuse, since each chapter was standalone and I could simply have skipped to the next. What I read of it, well, it really should have sold better.

Warren sent me BMOC, combining business and fiction, and we both loved it, then proceded not to get around to writing about it. Duh. It’s a fantastic book.

I’ll try to do better this time. How can you miss with a book that invokes Underdog on page 7? There’s no need to Fear! Barry Moltz is here!

Review or not, thought I’d point out the book. That way people can check it out regardless of any later lapse or delay on my part.