Small business is a topic I write about elsewhere — as in my day job, so typically I eschew it here. However, as small business technology seems to be getting lots of attention today, I’ll wear my professional small business marketplace watcher hat and make a few observations about today’s announcement from Microsoft regarding Office Live, a tiered suite of online services for small businesses. Coupled with the announcement yesterday of a free accounting software product for the small business market, this is a major escalation in the arms race between Microsoft and Intuit — with other deep pockets like Yahoo!, Google, eBay and Amazon also in the fray, along with an endless array of other players focused on niche small business technology and online opportunities and specialized needs. (I guess, in a big-tent way, this includes me, but here I’m focusing on the tech-provider giants.)

First off, Microsoft’s announcement is impressive: a three-tiered “freemium” product (free plus two pay options with additional services and features). One of the major advantages Microsoft has in the small business market is an army of resellers and Small Business Specialists. These folks are, in most instances, small business owners themselves who have the relationship and trust of their clients. How these “middle” players direct their small business clients in adopting the new online services vs. selling them desktop software and servers is a mystery to me.

Here is some context for today’s announcement — most are things I have blogged about in the past:

Most important point: This is not a new battle. It has been taking place for at least a decade. What’s new is the shift of the battle from the desktop to the browser; from boxed software to web applications. It’s now a Web 2.0 thing. It’s really fun to watch.

Disclosure: Most of the companies mentioned in this post have advertised in magazines published by Hammock Publishing, but none are clients — but, hey, my e-mail address and phone number are easy to find.

Technorati Tags: ebay, google, intuit, microsoft, small business, web2.0

(Note to those reading this via RSS - you’ll have to click through to my blog for this to make sense.) A week or so ago, I added a little code to the right sidebar of the rexblog that displays the photos of those who visit this page who are registered on a social-networking service called MyBlogLog.com. I was anticipating some problems with it as I’m leary of anything that has the potential of displaying a graphic on this site without at least chance of me previewing it. Despite my doubts and fears, so far it has been fun to watch who shows up over there. For example, I just noticed the photo of a person who got lots of money from Google today. That’s pretty cool that you can write a post about someone and then see their photo pop up as they come see what the heck you’ve written. It might not work on a heavily traffic’d site with dozens of photos streaming by, but it sure helps add a little hominess here. And it’s one of the first things I’ve seen that makes me want to actually visit a blog rather than read it through a newsreader.

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, social media

The dresser-uppers (or is that dressers-upper?) at Hammock Publishing.

I didn’t use the “acqhire” word earlier when I blogged the Google purchase of JotSpot as a round or two of VC funding took Jot out of that league. However, when a magazine/web property owned by a multi-billion dollar media giant buys buys Reddit, a company with four employees, now that fits the definition. Or, perhaps, in this case, I might call it “a long tail acquisition.”

Technorati Tags: acqhire

According to Terry Heaton, “aggregate traffic to (Nashville’s ABC affiliate, WKRN’s) 19 blogs last week exceeded traffic to the station’s primary Website, wkrn.com. This means the station has doubled its reach and created niche “businesses” in the market at the same time.”

I guess it’s because people like me are always pointing their way because they know how to point this way, as well.

Congratulations to Mike & Co. for jumping into the deep end while everyone else was afraid to stick their toes in the water.

Technorati Tags: blogging, media, nashville

From several sources, comes news of ‘The Google’ acquiring the wiki-creation tool, JotSpot. Here’s what the company’s blog says. Ross Mayfield, the early-entrepreneur in the wiki-tools category (his company, SocialText, focuses on wiki-tools and solutions for enterprises) is my go-to observer of this category. Here’s what he has to say.

I am pleased about this news for a totally selfish reason. Whenever I tell people in the real world — most of whom are still confused about “this whole blogging thing” — that a big portion of SmallBusiness.com is a wiki, I typically get the dazed response, “A what?” About six months ago, I toned down the whole “wiki” terminology on the site (although you can still get there via a redirect from the URL SmallBusinessWiki.com) and decided to wait until the term “wiki” is understood by a broader audience. We still have a long time before a general audience (i.e., the small businesses that Jotspot is targeting) understand a wiki is something more than Wikipedia (a site that uses a wiki platform) that can be used in many other ways. Google getting into the wiki-hosting space will help crank up the awareness meter.

Technorati Tags: google, jotspot, smallbuisness.com, wiki

Jimmy Wales has a response to Jason Calacanis’ unsolicited suggestion that Wikipedia run ads and contribute the revenue to charity.

It includes this jab:

“This was at Wikimania this past summer, and I barely even remember him… we were at a large table and there were some very much more interesting people at the dinner.”

For the record, I was at Wikimania but I wasn’t at that dinner. However, one night Dave Winer and I had dinner together and I think he’ll agree with me that we were the two most interesting people at the table for two.

Sidenote: Jimmy Wales, who rarely blogs, yesterday had a post about a neat jack-o-lantern he and his daughter made. I can say from experience, that kind of a project is way more fun than engaging in a flame war.

Technorati Tags: bloggers, blogging, wikimania, wikipedia

The Diet Coke/Mentos guys have a new video, this time with 500 liters of Diet Coke and 1,500+ Mentos and what looks like, from the credits, some corporate underwriting/sponsorship/assistance from both of those brands and an exclusive deal from Google Video. According to Geroge Strompolis of Google, “In addition to being very fun, it demonstrates another interesting application of our Sponsored Video program — this time with user-generated content. This helps producers like EepyBird earn revenue by pairing them up with our advertising partners.”

Technorati Tags: advertising, google, video

Because of some technical difficulties that were particularly perplexing to this blog’s hackery team, our RSS feed has not been picked up by FeedBurner for the past week. I think that problem has been solved. The problem probably was caused by some configuration issues on our end, not FeedBurner. However, the situation reminded me of what I don’t like about having multiple hosted features: When problems occur, there are different sets of fingers that can point in other directions.

I especially enjoy reading about how giant media companies like Time Inc. are trying to figure out what their digital future is in publications (like the Wall Street Journal today) owned by other giant media companies that could write the same articles about themselves.

Quote:

“From the introduction of color photography to the launch of People and the demise of the original Life, Time Inc. has been through upheaval before. But insiders say those changes were like pinpricks compared with the changes now under way. “Everyone is bowing before the gods of the digital future,” says one Time Inc. editor.”

I may have blogged this recently, but a few weeks ago I saw an ad for Life from the mid-1950s that said something like, “Over 5.7 million copies of Life are sold each week.” Those who study the history of these things wouldn’t describe as “a pinprick” what happened to the Life franchise over the next 15 years. My point is not to disagree with the trainwreck happening at Time, but rather to point out that the creation of radio and TV were more than pinpricks in the ever-evolving media landscape.

Technorati Tags: internet, magazines, media, timeinc

Let’s say the people who dreamed up spam set up a .ORG website that sounded very legitimate, something like Ethical Email Marketing Policy Organization, would I trust them to be the arbitrators of what legitimate spam practices are?

In much the same way, the people who dreamed up a scheme to get bloggers to make undisclosed posts for pay are now wanting us to believe they have created the good-housekeeping seal of disclosure. This is from the same folks who, before they were shamed into changing their policy, encouraged bloggers to take payment for undisclosed posts. And the new policy is merely a general disclosure, not a policy that requires bloggers to tag each post with a sponsorship tag.

Here’s all the disclosure policy one needs to be ethical. At the top of a paid post that appears to be one of the regular posts in your blog, write: “The is a sponsored post.” or “This is an advertisement.”

And another thing. The people who dreamed up this pay-per-post scheme respond to all criticism of it with the following attack: “Those who oppose us just don’t want bloggers to make money from their blogs.” That’s crap. I think that every blogger should have the right to monetize their blog in any ethical way they can. If you want to carry ads, that’s great. If you want to have sponsors who pay you to post something, that’s fine also, as long as you clearly state within that specific post: “I received payment to blog about this topic.”

rexblog flashback: A long post on why undisclosed paid posts are unethical and how clearly labeling what is paid-for is a simple solution.

Update: Scott Karp (as always) says exactly what I would if I could write as well as he does: “If you tell people in the fine print that you might deceive them, and then you go ahead and try to deceive them — well, that’s still deception….In a world of infinite media, the only asset anyone has left, whether blogger, search engine, or traditional media company, is TRUST. Deception destroys trust, and so it’s fundamentally bad for the media business.”

Technorati Tags: blogging

Over the years, Microsoft has tried many things (including an acquisition attempt that the Justice Department derailed) to compete with Intuit in the small business accounting market. Today, they have announced their next plan, a version of the popular Web 2.0 business model (based on the “shareware” model) called “freemium,” which is, basically, this: Give away a free version that is (possibly) ad-supported, and then sell premium services and upgrades when you get a large and loyal user-base.

Technorati Tags: intuit, microsoft, freeium, small business

My RSS feed from FeedBurner is “clunky,” they say. For some reason, I get a “connect time out” message whenever I try to update the Rexblog RSS feed they host. (Hey, I’m just a user — so I’m sure it’s my fault.) As I have encouraged everyone to use that feed, it is frustrating that I am running into such a difficulty. Note to self: Whenever something is free and hosted, well, you get what you pay for. I hope the FeedBurner RSS feed that I have encouraged everyone use in their newsreaders, etc., gets over being “clunky” but here are two ways to subscribe to the rexblog RSS feed:

1. The direct feed from rexblog: http://rexblog.com/?feed=rss2.

2. The FeedBurner version that currently is clunky: http://feeds.feedburner.com/rexblog_all.

Technorati Tags: feedburner, rss

I agree with Mike Arrington that the absurd sideshow of disclosure options being offered by the pay-per-post schemers is a mockery of ethics, does not address the issue and further exhibits their lack of understanding of how what they are doing is a cancer.

Rather than do something simple: Require all posts one receives direct payment (or other consideration) for to carry a clear “sponsored by” message, the pay-per-post schemers want to keep arguing that all revenue received by publishers (bloggers included) is the same, whether it be for an ad or for payment for a positive, undisclosed mentioned in a news story.

Why is this so difficult? If a post clearly says, “Sponsored post,” then, in my book, it’s ethical. In the magazineosphere, we call these “advertorials.”

Technorati Tags: ethics

Actually, Vince Young isn’t really podcasting, but Reebok is using their quickly-becoming-a-superstar endorsee in an online campaign to promote the shoe-company’s “When Did I Know?” campaign.

Impressive sidelight: Reebok’s PR firm working on this project must do some major Technorati digging as my occasional posts about the Titans rookie QB pinged a sonar and resulted in me getting a pitch from someone working on the account. (Disclosure: While I didn’t get “paid” to post this, if Vince Young keeps playing like he did today, I’ll be glad to point to anything he’s hyping. He’s 2-1 2-2 (see comments) as a starting quarterback with his only loss being against the Indiana Colts, 14-13.)

Geez. After the game his teammate, Pacman Jones, played today — despite the expectoration incident a few days before — I’d even be happy to point to anything he’s endorsing. I’m sure Pacman would be a great spokesman for one of these Nashville companies.

Technorati Tags: nashville, titans, vince young