Derek Scruggs

This is my first (and probably last) eBay auction. Check out the rocker board for sale.

Tonight I heard about PostSecret.com on NPR’s All Things Considered. A great way to procrastinate, and you get to feel like a voyeur to boot!

For the last several months I’ve had the privilege of  working with Liz Ryan and WorldWIT as a kind of virtual CTO. Though most of what I’ve been working on is either behind the scenes or still in development, recently we launched three blogs:

• Business Mom, hosted by the one and only Liz Ryan
• The Customer Clique, hosted by “the ultimate ‘people person’” Jeannie Walters
• Networking for Success, hosted by networking goddess Felicia Davis

This is a fun project. WorldWIT has members all over the world, and communication and interaction is their raison d’etre. We believe blogs will become an essential component of their business, and we have lots more neat stuff in the queue. So surf on over and subscribe to their feeds.

Because they get paid by the hour, most lawyers make more money when they act like bullies, because it escalates a dispute into a bigger dispute. Nevertheless, the world would be a better place if they followed this example, which is pretty much straight out of How to Win Friends and Influence People (aff.). Sometimes the best way to win an argument is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Brilliant advice in HELLO, My Name is Scott’s latest newsletter:

What are some ways to make your business cards stand out?

Recently I took about 100 business cards I’ve collected over the years and spread them out on the floor. I closed my eyes for 30 seconds, opened them and took note of which cards stood out the most. And here’s what I noticed:

• Red: every card that had red on it stood out.
• Picture: only a few cards had pictures of the cardholder. This not only made them stand out, but helped me connect faces with names and companies.
• Vertical: several cards were formatted vertically, which caught my eye.
• Black: most cards are white. The black ones REALLY stood out.
• Image: cards with some sort of colorful image that took up at least one fourth of the total surface area captured my interest.

Seth accidentally started a conversation about the value of an MBA (which I don’t have), and particularly some of the books one should read if you want to skip the school part and DIY.  Josh Kaufman picked up the ball by posting an impressive list of books he recommends, along with a few web sites that complement.

I’m too lazy to create such an exhaustive list, but a couple that I would add are:

• Under the Radar by Arnold Kling – a sadly underpublicized book that has a lot of great insight (and case studies) on how to start an Internet business without venture capital (and I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the case studies)
• The Portable MBA in Finance and Accounting by John Leslie Livingstone – nothing especially earth-shaking here, just solid information that makes it easier to understand what investors are looking for
• Good to Great and Built to Last by Jim Collins – Collins is the most important business thinker of our generation. These books will be required reading for the next 100 years.

Josh mentioned Getting Things Done, but I want to make a special endorsement of this incredible book. This should be required reading of everyone, not just MBA students. I adopted this system about two years ago and it changed my life. Seriously. Who knew learning how to manage your to-do list could have such a profound impact?

NB: These are all affiliate links.

From the confirmation page that comes after Chief Blogging Officer’s signup page:

“Your personal information means a lot to us.That’s why we use only the finest equipment to process it.”

Bnoopy has an excellent post about how the long tail phenomenon applies to software. He makes the point that there are millions of “custom applications,” but not the kind that people like me make a living building. Rather, these custom applications are built on top of Excel and email. JotSpot (his company) evidently is trying to become a web-enabled platform for these kinds of applications, which would allow it to address “Millions of Markets of Dozens.”

His thesis strikes me as right on. And if he succeeds, he’ll be the next software billionaire. But changing users’ habits is hard, and even Excel struggled in the early days. (Fortunately for them, Lotus fumbled the ball.)

(The timing on this is excellent. I just signed up for a JotSpot beta account yesterday.)

Lately I’ve been going through and reading Warren Buffet’s Shareholder Letters. I set up Outlook to remind me to go download one every week, and every time it’s 15 minutes well-spent.

As noted elsewhere, Buffet is not just the world’s greatest investor, he’s also a great writer. I don’t think I ever actually enjoyed a shareholder letter until I stumbled across these. Alas, I’m not a shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway, so I can only admire the prose, not partake in the results.

This is rich. On the heels of yesterday’s revelation that some of Google’s pages use black-hat SEO techniques, Google has banned itself for cloaking.

This reminds me of those Bud Light Cedric the Entertainer commercials about the downside of being your own boss. He enjoyed working for himself until some inappropriate comments led him to file a sexual harassment suit against himself, so he ultimately had to fire himself.