Over the past week, much has been written about what it takes to build and run a successful startup. It started with a post from Jason Calacanis where he suggested 17 tips to save money while running a startup. In the article, Jason suggested that you should fire anyone who is not a "workaholic" (update: Jason has written more about what he meant to say). The original post caused quite a stir: first TechCrunch responded to Jason's post by suggesting that Calacanis fires people who have a life. 37 Signals weighed in with their take on work/life balance. Then Allen at Center Networks provided his own perspective.

So bloggers are just pure and outright liars. They lie about their traffic, lie about the money that they say they make and lie about a skill they claim to be an expert about.

Then on the flip side, there are bloggers who very well may been too honest. They are so honest that the truth of what they say actually hurts them as for the fact that they give away all their ideas. (Who does that remind you of?)

After spending the morning working on some client copy, I began thinking about words and phrases that are overused in ads, web copy, and business communication. I'm an easygoing person generally, but I get irrationally annoyed by certain words and phrases. Here are a few of my top annoyances.

"...that's right for you." As in, "ask your insurance agent about the coverage that's right for you." Another variation is to ask whether something is "right for you," as in "ask your doctor whether Prozac is right for you." It always strikes me as a little smarmy, and it's probably because it's such obvious ad-speak--nobody really talks like that. What really gets me, though, is when you're watching those pharmaceutical ads when the two friends are talking casually about their hemorrhoids and the one friend says to the other, "you should ask your doctor if Preparation H is right for you." Nobody says that!

When Aaron Brazell put his blog up for sale, he got a rude awakening of what he was not doing with his blog that would have made his blog more marketable, thus worth buying.

Recently, I started thinking about what I'm not doing with my blog that I should. I do a lot already, and I also am an advocate of organic marketing, natural marketing and viral techniques rather than grasping and desperate. So what more could I do to increase the diversity of those who read my blog, keep readers happy, and continue to be a source for information on blogging and WordPress?

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Social SoftwareIn our increasingly visual culture, it's no surprise that someone has taken the time to visualize the data flow of Twitter and all of its tweets. It is a surprise, however, that seventeen different groups or individuals found a way to visualize Twitter tweets, each in a unique and supposedly helpful way (and our guess is that there's probably more out there).

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Office, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware

Like any normal human being with a computer, you probably use your USB jacks, and according to OS market-share statistics, you're machine is probably some flavor of Windows. So you're probably familiar with having to click that annoying little icon to bring up the SRH (Safely Remove Hardware) dialog box when you need to disconnect a USB device, but it's possible to make the disconnect process a little easier.

This week we're looking at five different methods that I'd use to find readership if I were starting a new blog. So far we've explored guest posting, advertising and networking - but today I want to turn our attention to the explosive and dynamic area of social media.

Social media sites have exploded onto the online publishing scene over the last couple of years and can generally be divided into two types of site:

Quality links to your website remain one of the strongest contributors to high organic rankings in search engines. Plus, a link from a popular website could bring you increased traffic and brand recognition. All you email marketers out there may not realize the potential role you could play in generating links to your organization's website. Link building is difficult in part because it requires you to start and cultivate relationships with people who care about issues relevant to your organization. You've already established this relationship with your list, making them an excellent potential source for links!

Filed under: Productivity, Web services, Google, web 2.0

It looks like Google is preparing to add offline functionality to Google Calendar. A few days ago the folks at the Digital Streets blog noticed that Google seemed to have added some code to the Google Calendar page that would bring up a prompt to install Google Gears for access to 3 months worth of calendar data while you're offline. But once you install Google Gears, nothing happens.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Mozilla, Freeware

FireGestures is a new Firefox extension that enables mouse gestures in the Firefox web browser.

If you've never tried using mouse gestures with Firefox or any other program, FireGestures is a great place to start, offering out-of-the-box functionality along with accessible advanced options.