Business books I’m reading this summer include the newly revised edition of Accidental Genius by Mark Levy. It’s an insightful guide to using freewriting to jumpstart idea generation - whether you want to solve a business problem or articulate a book concept. Highly recommended.

I read and reviewed Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus. And was prompted to dip back into Seth Godin‘s latest book, Linchpin, after he gave a live seminar in DC.

I review Chris Anderson's new bestseller, FREE, in the latest issue of my newsletter, WordBiz Report.

Date: Aug. 25, 2009
Location: Coast of Maine
Subscribers: 9,092 cool peeps
Mood: Bittersweet end-of-summer. You?
Looking forward to: Gov 2.0 Summit (Sept. 9-10, 2009)
Stolen from: Silicon Valley bigshot Jason Calacanis

When I say "stolen from" I mean a few lines at the top of an e-newsletter that give you choice coordinates 

Blogging is a key piece of Web 2.0 or the Social Web, as it's called. The Social Web means crowdsourcing: looking to your customers and fans for knowledge and smarts. It means that painstaking creation of static, stuffy, stilted Web pages is out. Blogs (interactive) are in. Here are my Top 8 Tips to launch an effective corporate blogging program in 2008.

1. Use humor

I don't mean funny ha ha. Poke fun at yourself. Be

I've compiled a handful I thought you'd find useful (or funny): Top 14 trends from Seth Godin's new book, Meatball Sundae; 10 tips for new bloggers from Jorn Barger who coined the term "Weblog" 10 years ago; Pete Blackshaw's Official 2008 Web 2.0 Buzzword Forecast; the best of Harvard Business Online. Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word Of The Year is w00t! More…

2007 Word of the Year 

Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word Of The Year is w00t! (Yes,

My holiday gift to you, dear reader, is dressed up in a smartly packaged PDF. It's an enhanced transcript of the teleconference I did for the Personal Branding Telesummit marking the 10th anniversary of Tom Peters' now iconic article: The Brand Called You. You can also listen to the audio recording of this session.

Download Link

Download the PDF: How to Write a Great Business Blog 

Listen to the audio recording

Download the MP3 audio

My holiday gift to you, dear reader, is dressed up in a smartly packaged PDF. It's an enhanced transcript of the teleconference I did for the Personal Branding Telesummit marking the 10th anniversary of Tom Peters' now iconic article: The Brand Called You. You can also listen to the audio recording of this session.

Download Link

Download the PDF: How to Write a Great Business Blog 

Listen to the audio recording

Download the MP3 audio recording of this teleconference.

In this one-hour audio conference we touched on the distinction between personal and business blogs, writing for search engines, blog writing tricks, inviting conversation with readers, blogs vs. e-newsletters, how to handle controversy, measuring success and more.

The Personal Branding Global Telesummit celebrated the 10th anniversary of the publication of Tom Peters' article: The Brand Called You…

Should you ghostblog for your CEO? Is anonymous blogging OK? Do you need a blog editor? All is revealed in the audio recording and enhanced PDF transcript of my April 2007 teleconference. Buy and download instantly. When the rubber meets the road, the content of your blog is what will determine its success or failure. By content I mean the topics, the writers, the voice, the links, the Comments from readers. The first teleconference Should you ghostblog for your CEO? Is anonymous blogging OK? Do you need a blog editor? All is revealed in the audio recording and enhanced PDF transcript of my April 2007 teleconference. Buy and download instantly. When the rubber meets the road, the content of your blog is what will determine its success or failure. By content I mean the topics, the writers, the voice, the links, the Comments from readers. The first teleconference in my series on corporate blogging focused on the knotty problem of how to create a content strategy for a corporate or organizational blog. [more]