Hey, this isn’t brain surgery: Let he who has never flipped a negative cast the first stone.

What’s on tap for small business in Washington this year? Our client, NFIB, is featured in this Fortune piece by Jeffrey Birnbaum.

Quote:

Small businesses’ wish list likely won’t be satisfied right away, given how swiftly Congress tends to act. But official Washington’s predilection for small over big businesses will surely bring plenty of good things over the long haul.

What recession in reporting? Since reading his book, the Nashville Scene’s Bill Carey has secured (with a death grip) the top spot on my list of best business writers covering Nashville. His cover story this week displays how far a publication can surpass its competition with merely a little insight and counter intuitive reporting.

Quote:

During the past three years, as one Nashville-based company after another has fallen on hard times, followers of business news in Nashville have been asking each other the same question: Is there any good news out there?

Actually, there is. Adam Smith first articulated the thought some 200 years ago, but people still seem surprised when market-based solutions arrive to push out the old moss. And in the process, certain people get rich.

Are they naming it the Ambrose detector? A software program designed by Georgia Tech professors to detect cheating in students’ computer programming homework turned up 186 possible violators, school officials said. No doubt, someone will make the connection between this and those same students’ practice of “exchanging” MP3 files.

A Rutgers University study of 2,200 students at 21 colleges in 2000 found that 10 percent admitted they had borrowed fragments of material they had found on the Internet, while 5 percent said they had taken large passages or entire papers.

Don’t tell Kevin Bacon about this: No doubt funded by some big government grant, researchers at Columbia are carrying out a large-scale test of Milgram’s “small world phenomenon,” better known as the “six degrees of separation.” This is significant to marketers as Milgram’s theory serves as the philosophical foundation of “viral marketing.” Indeed, one of the premises of the best-selling
The Tipping Point is built on the concept of “connectors” who serve as the glue of the “six degrees” process.

Oh Yeah? A Mac purist since 1984, I long ago quit trying to convince Windows users my machine and platform were superior to theirs. Why bother, I determined. It’s like being French: the French know their language and culture are superior, it’s just the rest of the world who’s decided differently.

I’ve been lucky to be in the publishing field, consistently one of Apple’s strongest niches. It allows me to say to regular business people that I still use a Mac because of its good graphics, or whatever, without having to go into detail about how anyone who doesn’t use a Mac is sub-human.

A few years ago, Windows machines began to enter our Mac-dominated office however. The first masked itself as a voice mail system. We are now so PC about our PCs, we allow new employees to swing either way. (I even think most of our Window-using employees haven’t yet realized that we make fun of them behind their backs.)

I believe many of my beliefs regarding marketing are based on my devotion to the Macintosh. I’ve endured much to remain an Apple customer, and at times I was probably more cultist than customer.
But many of the past handicaps using a Mac posed for me are now corrected (another story for another day). And I long ago won the bet with one of my partners regarding the probability of Apple’s demise (and that was about five years ago).

For some Apple propaganda on why they’re superior, check out their attempts to debunk some widely held beliefs about Mac vs. Windows.