Here's an exciting development: a true debate on ideas, on the web, spontaneous combustion, involving some very well known great thinkers of our time: Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Mark Cuban, and Ellen Goodman.

Chris Anderson gathered the wood and laid out the fire. He's editor of Wired...

Is venture capital new, innovative small business, or just big business disguised?  Steve King at Small Biz Labs this morning has a good summary of the debate about venture capital and government-funded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants.

Last year 3,600 smaller...

You know who you are. You hate selling, but here you are, making your way as entrepreneur, having to sell or sink.

Me? I'm a terrible salesperson. I'm also bad at networking, cocktail parties, and small talk with people I don't know. Do I seem stuck up, aloof? Not really,...

Secret cameras, secret Web utilities tracking employees' Web use, secret phone recording and IM monitoring: that's creepy. That's BIG BROTHER: the Orwellian 1984 nightmare. But bosses reading your tweets and Facebook? What's creepy about that isn't that bosses might do it, it's the rest of us complaining about...

I'm getting to know Twitter more these days, using it more, and enjoying it. I'm Timberry on Twitter. I'm frequently grateful to Twitter friends for pointing out good ideas, blogs, thoughts, pictures. Twitter enlivens my day, and brightens my writing.

I'm beginning to develop a sense of what to...

First 100 days? Small business? Face it: the federal government moves way, way more slowly than the average small business. Small business doesn't wait.

I asked other small business owners. How do you think the Obama administration did for small business in its first 100 days. I got a...

The boom in social media, my happy association with some very smart Generation Y people, and a good book or two (Me 2.0, among them, and Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz) have me very intrigued with a broader application of branding.

I was taught to think of branding as...

Two Very Important Sentences:

Fred Wilson of AVC posted my favorite line from the president's press conference today; and the whole post -- brilliant blogging, in my opinion -- was this simple quote:

At the same time, the rest of us can’t...

I love twitter. What blogging is to email, twitter is to instant messaging (IM) ... and then some. You can follow me on twitter as Timberry. I'm like a fish with a shiny new thing. And, with due respect to the MSNBC line (if you don't get it,...

The trouble with a small business bailout is deeply rooted in practical logistics. Small business is as diverse and wide spread as the country is. There are something like 25 million small businesses, and 20 million of them have no employees. How does the government help them?

It's time to...

Words and spin department: small business innovation. It's happening all the time, but we use different words to describe it:

But rather than calling it innovation, they simply describe what they do and the results they're looking for. Words such as "tweak," "adjust," "improve" and "change" roll off...

Back in the seemingly pre-historic 1950s an interviewer asked pianist Liberace if it bothered him that people made fun of his flamboyance (which was a code word, back then for being gay). He answered:

"I cry all the way to the bank."

Flash forward: this week and last, Jon...

I'm so done with people blaming "the media" for bad economic news. New media or old, one constant is that it's about getting an audience. What's news is what's different, surprising, interesting, or remarkable. It's not good or bad, it's news.

Today I saw the blog post here that...

Coincidence? Last night I wrote an email to a nice woman roughly my baby-boomer age answering her "Should I put my business on Facebook?" question with a polite "probably not." This morning I see Michael Gray's post Web 2.0 Weenies and Bulls**t Social Media Economics. I think it's more...

All the blather about Obama's small business taxes is sound and fury only, signifying nothing except perhaps how few non-business opinion leaders know what they're talking about when they talk about small business.

Here's the deal, and I say it as somebody who's built my own business from zero to...

What a shame. The wisdom of crowds is a good idea. User reviews is another good idea. You click and then read. There's reassurance of good reviews. How many times have you been influenced by reviewers' stars for one product or another. And lately also for services (as in Google...

Last week we asked business owners about business credit: bank loans, commercial credit, SBA loans, etc. Results were not good, as the numbers (below) show. But perhaps more importantly, we examined what the small business credit crunch really means - not as numbers or statistics, but as hard times for...

How do you spell "no-duh?" New research just released by the SBA shows that Advance Planning Pays Off for Start-Ups. That's the headline on a good piece of reporting by Kelly Spors of the Wall Street Journal's Independent Street. And, to be fair, she also offers...

It should be a simple question, right? How bad is the credit crunch for small business? Here we are, having just passed a huge national stimulus bill and heard Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's outlines for his economic strategy.

Will the stimulus work? For whom? And what about the...

Last week John Jantsch posted My Social Media System, detailing his twice-daily, daily, weekly, and monthly routines in blogging, Twitter, and so on. In email he asked me (and several others) to join in:

I would love it if you would consider writing a similar post on your...