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From the category archives:

Weblogs

But Can We Trust the Trust Agents?

by Tim Berry on September 22, 2009

in Social media, Weblogs, Writing

I was just getting back to the office yesterday, a Monday morning after a week away – 4 days of business, and 3 relaxing and invigorating days in Yosemite, which is really away — when Dan Levine (@schoolmarketer on Twitter) suggested I read The social media country club on Mark Shaeffer’s businessgrow blog.

Yes, I’m a sucker for contrary points of [...]

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Yosemite and America’s Best Idea

by Tim Berry on September 18, 2009

in Weblogs

I’m a bit off my normal thought patterns today, waking up in a generic freeway-exit hotel in the California Central Valley, headed for Yosemite National Park with my youngest daughter.
Yosemite means a lot to me. My dad took my brothers and me there many times when we were growing up in the San Francisco [...]

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What’s In a Name? Lots.

by Tim Berry on September 14, 2009

in Weblogs

Blog names and titles: do you agree that some are better than others? Lots of blogs have succeeded with titles that are merely descriptive, not remarkable: Seth’s blog, Small Business Technology, Escape from Cubicle Nation, and many others.
Browsing around the other day, I discovered a Jay White who calls his blog “Dumb Little Man.” [...]

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Maybe Writing Isn’t So Obsolete After All

by Tim Berry on September 10, 2009

in Weblogs, Writing

Just a few years ago I was mourning the loss of the printed word in our media-hungry and web-hungry society. Even people I really respect, although most of them much younger than I, were starting to show cavalier disregard for the English language. I’d grimace while reading something that mistook then for [...]

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This post isn’t about the football star who punched an opponent; it’s about sportsmanship in general, sports business as oxymoron, twitter, YouTube, millions of dollars, and the impact of the ultimate big brother.
The ultimate big brother in this story is a lot like George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother, but without the malice. He’s just [...]

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Want to Write Well? Cut Mercilessly

by Tim Berry on September 4, 2009

in Weblogs, Writing

Back in my distant past I had to learn to live with editing. I was in my twenties. It made me mad. Why change my stuff? But it also made my stuff better.
“Berry, you write like a God-damned literature major.” (Norberto Schwarzman)
So said the overnight editor at UPI back in 1972.  He did me a [...]

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What makes a good manager? Is it something you’re born with, or something you learn? Is there management instinct? I don’t know for sure. I’ve been in business for more than 30 years now, and I still don’t know.
A few years ago I was trapped on a plane with nothing to read but The One-Minute [...]

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Can You Do It: Business Pitch in 140 Characters

by Tim Berry on August 19, 2009

in Weblogs

Brevity is good. Brevity for business pitches is good too. The idea of pitching a new business in a single 140-character tweet (pardon the expression) is intriguing to me. Do you think you could do that?
Celebrity entrepreneur Richard Branson is pitching a Twitter pitch contest as part of a startup training program he’s involved in.
That [...]

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I’ve had a run-in on this before, including this one on the Huffington Post that got a lot of comments …  but still, look at this delightful post from thenextweb.com:

Author Zee, editor in chief at thenextweb.com, titled it: “Note to self: Don’t ‘friend’ your boss and then bitch about the job.”
After all, what part [...]

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Yes, I think it does matter. And no, although it won’t last, not like it is now, it is the beginning of something that will last, but will be changing a lot. I could say the same about personal computing, the Web, and blogging.
Twitter is all the rage because it hit fertile ground. People like [...]

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