Bizosphere

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.