I've seen it too many times: starry-eyed would-be Internet entrepreneur meets real developer, dream in hand. This is culture clash. More often than not, it ends up with wasted time, wasted money and dashed dreams. Concept meets computer code.

It's an old joke:

Question: In the classic bacon and egg breakfast, what's the role of the chicken, and what's the role of the pig? Answer: the chicken is involved. The pig is committed.

Good joke or not,...

Everybody agrees that small business is good for an economy, that it promotes jobs, and so on. But what does anybody want the government to do about it? And what can governments really do about it, effectively?

More small business loans, perhaps? Lower taxes? Cut regulations?...

It's really a shame. As the world moves faster and faster, tools get better, change is more rapid, people, businesses, and organizations need good business planning more than ever. Unfortunately, as the need has grown, so too has the size of the whoppers that experts who should know better tell....

As the November 2nd elections near, every politician is suddenly small business' best friend. Every problem in small business is caused by the opposing party, and every new proposal is going to rejuvenate small business and entrepreneurship in this country, they say.

The question is: do you believe it?...

Imagine a large auditorium with a boxing ring in the middle. "Ladies and gentlemen," the announcer's voice echoes, "in this corner, we have the Wall Street Journal, saying computers make you smarter. And in the opposite corner, the New York Times, saying they make you dumber."

Sure, you might have...

It's not that I'm unsympathetic to complaints about Facebook privacy, or, actually, lack of privacy. I get it. Facebook felt like a private medium in the beginning, especially to the college students who gave it its sizzle. I don't like Mark Zuckerberg as Big Brother any more than I liked...

Do you recognize the Simon & Garfunkel song, The Sounds of Silence? It's a sad song about loss. But silence is also golden. It's a powerful tool in business and life. Learn to use it.

There's a place for truth in writing. And there's a place for writing in blogging. Sometimes truth happens, even in blogs. Sometimes, when it does, it's startling.

Honestly, I never cared that any writer was man or woman. What...

It’s one of those days. Maybe you have technical problems, or a project that isn’t going well, you couldn’t sleep last night, you’ve run into a writer’s block or thinker’s block or city block. Maybe you just lost a client. Or learned about a powerful new competitor. Or maybe it’s...

On the bad days, in off moments, it seems like my two years in business school were mostly about learning the definitions of a few key buzz words to use in meetings.

1. ROI

Stands for return on investment, as in profits divided by total investment. For fun in boring...

We baby boomers have lost too many cultural icons. Don't take away Woodstock.

Some nut shot John Lennon. Good journalism -- or was it reality? -- took away our faith in institutions. We've pretty much lost Ford, Chevrolet, General Motors, Wall Street, faith in television news, trust in doctors, air,...

I just read Scott Shane's First, Do No Harm to Small Business on the New York Times blog. And this is awkward because I like Scott, I've read and recommended his books, read his posts, and like his analysis. He does business numbers very well. But he's off...

Back in the old days, editors decided what was news, not advertisers and not readers. There was this concept called "news values." Full-time professionals laid out the front page. They tried to highlight important political, economic, and social trends, coverage deemed important, rather than celebrities, fashions, nudity, and violence.

This -- the TechCrunch publishes stolen information flap from last week -- is why I worry about the gradual disappearance of journalism as newspapers and traditional advertising disappear.

You may or may not have read about it. Somebody stole documents from Twitter's computer and sent them to TechCrunch. They...

Committees don't make great software. It takes a single person, an author. Maybe he gets some help. Teams don't do it. Nobody sees the whole elephant.

I'm pretty sure I heard that basic sentiment first in about 1986, from Dave Winer, who was then the author of a Macintosh...

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...