The essence of small business: (Required reading from this week’s “My Turn” column in Newsweek, an essay titled, “Life Didn’t Pass Me By, It Stopped In for Gas.”

Quote:

“The rewards of this kind of life tip the scales to the side of personal growth rather than expanding net worth….To run a small retail business is to be on the front lines of American life, and the lessons are there for the taking, if you’re interested….What is lost when the person who waits on you doesn’t know your name? Is there nothing more to consumerism than just acquiring? Do speed and price trump a vanishing standard of personal service?

I mean it. Required!

Technorati Tags: smallbusiness

Southwest shuts down Board-A: I feel guilty. I never blogged about board-A.com because, okay, I confess, I am a selfish person. I didn’t want lots of people learning that some guy had hacked a way to game the whole online-checking-in process at Southwest.com so that selfish people like me could get an “A” boarding pass every time. Also, I figured something that good couldn’t last. And, alas, it hasn’t. Apparently, on March 11, the airlines I live on (indeed, I spent two hours on it today) shut ‘em down. Weasles.

Technorati Tags: swa

URL-based Technorati search: The following is probably an ancient feature I’ve just noticed, however, I can’t be the only one who has missed it. You can launch a Technorati search via a URL (sorta like gada.be with a longer address). Just replace KEYWORD with your search term in the following:

http://www.technorati.com/search/KEYWORD

Technorati Tags: search, technorati

David Weinberger: “Bill Frist climbs aboard the Cluetrain.” (Regarding Frist’s invoking Cluetrain Manifesto and its authors in a blog post about his support of the Online Freedom of Speech Act.

Observation: Cluetrain makes for strange bedfellows.

(Note: Weinberger and Doc Searls are two of the book’s co-authors.)

Technorati Tags: cluetrain, nashville