Bizosphere

“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.