Home | TrendTracker | PowerBlog Reviews | The Experts | Newsletter
ABOUT
SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS brings you daily updates on trends that influence the global small business market.
Anita Campbell, Editor
Past life: CEO, corporate executive, tech entrepreneur, retailer, general counsel, marketer, HR ... (more)
email me
free business magazines
FREE BUSINESS MAGAZINES
Trade publications FREE to qualified professionals. No hidden offers and no purchase necessary.
On Wall Street
The Deal
Computing Canada
CIO
Employee Benefit
Oracle Magazine
100+ additional titles. Click to browse.
ARCHIVES & SEARCH
Previous Small Business Trends articles can be found at the links below:
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
Or, use the search box below to find a
specific post:


NEWSLETTER
Sign up for our FREE Small Business Trends newsletter. (View Current)

We publish regularly and promise we won't share your email address with anyone. (Privacy Policy)
SMALL BIZ INFO & RESOURCES
BLOGS TO READ DAILY*
* Don’t have time to read several dozen blogs a day? Pick two or three. Your brain will thank you for it.
ONLINE COMMUNITIES
BLOG DIRECTORIES
THE BUZZ

SPECIAL RESOURCES
Small Business Trends Radio
Tuesdays, 1:00 PM Eastern U.S. time
on Voice America network
Click to listen

November 1st: Torsten Jacobi, CEO of Creative Weblogging, joins host Anita Campbell. Sponsored by Six Disciplines. Show details.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
TrendTracking: Small Business News Site & More
Welcome to the second edition of TrendTracking, a weekly feature that we hope will become a popular place for small businesses to see and be seen.
  • Be Excellent, the blog of Six Disciplines Corporation, has a new format. Skip Reardon, the Marketing Director of Six Disciplines, writes the blog. Part of the blog's purpose is to be a companion to the Six Disciplines book and methodology.

    But Skip has broadened the subject matter. He is writing about a variety of small business topics culled from different sources, not just about the book. I especially like his "Bottomline" summary paragraph at the end of each post, in which he emphasizes his point. He is planning to move to a more robust blogging software, because Blogger does not support categories, which are absolutely essential for a business blog.


  • News.smallbusiness.com (great domain name!) offers news aggregation channels just for small business news. News.smallbusiness.com pulls news stories and blog posts from many sources. It aggregates them into a single page, with six categories: economy, finance, management, marketing, policy and technology. Naturally there are RSS feeds for the main channel and for each category. The end result is a resource specifically designed around "small business" news, rather than the broader business news which would contain content not relevant to the small business market. News.smallbusiness.com is run by Hammock Publishing, whose CEO, Rex Hammock, happens to be a blogger, too.


  • Catapult is the entrepreneur's site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This is a fun site with a fresh take on being an entrepreneur. At first glance it looks pretty standard. But when you delve into it, you realize someone there has a wickedly funny sense of humor. In fact, Rebecca Martin, a journalist with the site, tells me that treating business subjects with humor is one of their goals: "Aimed at under-35 entrepreneurial types, we like to keep things light-hearted and humorous." Read the Smart Fabrics article and tell me if you don't agree.


  • Selling is Dead -- did you know that? That's the name of a new book by two authors from here in Northeast Ohio, USA, where I live and work. They have a blog as an online companion for the book, also called Selling is Dead. One of the posts caught my eye with these statistics: "50% of sales people do not meet their quotas"; and "3 out of 4 product launches fails to meet expectations." Those are wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee numbers. I haven't read this book yet, but just judging from some of the posts, I will probably recommend it to several early-stage, entrepreneur friends and colleagues. Sales is invariably the weakest part of any technology startup.


  • Technorati Blog Finder: Ever since I wrote last week about the Small Business Blog Directory, readers have been sending me links to other directories. One of those is Technorati's Blog Finder. I certainly appreciate and thank Technorati for all the free services it provides (and I appreciate the thoughtful email I got from Technorati Feedback -- on a weekend, too!).

    Unfortunately Blog Finder falls short. The main problem is that if a blogger designates a blog as having posts under a certain keyword, then the blog gets listed for that keyword. Sounds logical, right? Except: that leads to the questionable situation where a pop culture or politics blog may devote very few of its posts to "business" but still ends up being categorized under business blogs. For instance, one of the top blogs listed as a business blog in Technorati's Blog Finder has 1464 posts, of which a mere 23 posts over five years are categorized as "business." Yet, it is listed under "business," ahead of other blogs with far more business content. While Technorati's Blog Finder may be useful for some purposes, you will not get a good picture of the business blog landscape from it.


  • Google Blog Search: Speaking of blog search, just today Google introduced its own blog and RSS search engine. Search Engine Watch has a substantive post describing the features and how best to use it.
More news... more trends... more insight...

Home | Privacy | Terms | SmallBizTrends
(c) Copyright 2003 - 2005, Small Business Trends LLC. All rights reserved.