This week’s Time magazine has an excellent, must-read article on how unpublished authors are using podcasting to make an end run around traditional publishing venues that have rejected them. Here’s a rough summary of the business model:
While successful authors pitch their works on their own Web sites, many newer writers are posted on Podiobooks.com. Evo [...]

People, for instance, are fixing their homes rather than buying new ones. Hence, happy stories like A&A Millwork, which is actually expanding in these bad times.

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It’s not that the love affair is over, it’s that we can’t afford the relationship any more.
We are reliably informed that whatever part of the economic crisis can’t be pinned on Wall Street — or on mortgage-related financial insanity — can be pinned on consumers who overspent. But personal consumption amounts to some 70 percent [...]

There are few words so simultaneously fraught with but utterly devoid of meaning as “name-nouns.” You know what I mean — words like “Marxism,” “Hobbesianism,” or, everyone’s favorite in the last few months, “Keynesianism.” Well, the word-du-jour on the economic crisis buffet line is “Keynesianism” (and its conservative-speak substitute, “socialism”). In its totally-drained-of-meaning state, Keynesianism [...]

The man who has been given the tiny, inconsequential job of rescuing the American economy.
Since returning to Washington, [Larry Summers] has expanded his turf so that it touches on nearly every area of domestic and international policy, from health-care reform to trade. Obama has elevated Summers to a level on par with the President’s daily [...]

Shoestring entrepreneurs, home-based businesses, and especially Ebay businesses have used this pricing model on the Internet for years, particularly in music. Unknown musicians in particular have found that they can put up their otherwise obscure, otherwise forgotten music and albums on the Internet and set a price of . . . “whatever.” Others, such as [...]

This is actually several days old, but James Surowiecki summarily makes the argument for Obama’s “tiny” tax cuts in this week’s New Yorker. Money quote:
The key factor . . . is whether people think of a windfall as wealth or as income. If they think of it as wealth, they’re more likely to save it, [...]

75,000. In one day. And Republicans in Congress stand (absolutely motionless) on principle.
Home Depot, Caterpillar, Sprint Nextel and at least eight other companies announced on Monday they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the United States and around the world — a gloomy start to the workweek for employees anxious about holding their own [...]

I’m going to start with that old conundrum meant to separate the optimists from the pessimists:
“Is the glass half-empty or half-full?”
I have an answer to that question: It depends.
It depends on whether you’re drinking from the glass or filling it.
Now I work with many start-ups, entrepreneurs, and independent filmmakers. If there’s one thing they are [...]

Buy less. Borrow less. Work more. Sounds like treason to me.
But it will be up to the United States, as the global leader, to pull the planet out of this tailspin and, to do so, experts say Americans will have to rebuild the engines that drive our economic growth. They say we’ll have to throttle [...]

I have spent most of this morning crunching the numbers the just released (January 24) Q4 Money Tree Report gathered by Thomson Financial and released through PriceWaterhouse Coopers and the NVCA. PriceWaterhouse doesn’t have the report up yet on the official Money Tree site, but you can download it from NVCA here. Charts can be [...]

Phil Gramm didn’t cause the recession. Well, not all of it, anyway.
Gramm said he arrived in Washington in 1978 convinced as an economist that subsidizing housing and mortgage lending was a bad idea, but was soon won over to Washington’s pro-housing consensus. During his 1990 U.S. Senate campaign, he said, polls revealed that 82% [...]

This guy ain’t afraid to pick a fight.
“President Obama — backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists — believes that China is manipulating its currency,” Mr. Geithner wrote. He stopped short of charging that China is manipulating its currency intentionally to gain an unfair trade advantage, as the 1988 law requires for [...]

As much as I like to hallucinate about my own greatness, I can never approach the lucidity of Eugene Fama’s discussion of all these government bailouts. His basic argument, which is the common-sensical nose-on-your-face obvious argument any freshman in macroeconomics will give you, is this:
Government bailouts must be financed.

Since the government does not have the [...]

I just came off of a product demonstration of Genius Inside. We talk about several SaaS project management software solutions in the Shoestring Venture book, but Genius Inside didn’t make it (it wasn’t out). Many of the solutions, such as Basecamp, are more or less fancy scheduling tools rather than full-throated project management tools.
But if [...]

TechCrunch has an excellent article on why Google employees quit and reproduces an entire thread from an online group Google set up for employees who were quitting. Believe it or not, there are some remarkable leadership, management, and start-up lessons to be culled from the employee posts they reproduce (and, of course, if you for [...]

Out with the old and in with the old, I say.
Two very smart post-mortems on the economic missteps of the Bush era: Justin Fox at Time.com and Douglas Holtz-Eakin at NewMajority.com. Both are worth a bit of dissection. After the break, of course.

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Sniper rifle software for the iPod Touch. Twelve bucks at the iTunes store.

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The people of the United States get their government back.
Obama signed executive orders and directives to tighten rules on lobbyists, freeze the pay of senior White House staffers, expand release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act and find new ways to tap into the knowledge and experience of ordinary Americans.
“Transparency and the [...]