Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

In such a crazy investment envrionment one can either forget about the stock market completely or become glued to its every move. I for one have chose the latter. Following the markets volatility has become a daily thing for me. Not because I day trade or have large sums of money riding on these movements, but because its drama filled.

I of course check my google finance to see what the market as a whole is doing but while I move around I also check the news. While CNN Money is a nice one to browse I recently (yes I’m out of the llop) discovered that while the online version of the Wall Street Journal has mostly paid access, the mobile version is free.

Although the articles are more limited than the online version you can’t beat free from a great in the know investing resource.

So as I sit from my mobile phone writing this let me direct you to http://m.wsj.com.

Since I started blogging I’ve gotten to know some great people involved with the online money making world. It all started when a co-worker pointed me towards Steve Pavlina’s Blog and all the money he makes from his pesonal development blog. This was shortly after I had started to play around with some web publishing of my own so the timing was great.

This co-worker then stopped working for the same company and became a freelance webdesigner along with creating other sites that employ writers, photographers, and bring him passive income. At least thats my guess since I haven’t been able to get a hold of him to find out how things are going ever since he decided to bike across America.

I also met some other great people around the blogosphere and had some great conversations and a dinner with a little more known internet entrepreneur, Yaro Starak. He was in Hawaii on his way back to Australia from Canada and I was able to have dinner at a local hot spot on the beach and discuss all things internet. He gave me some great advice, that, although he may not see me following it yet, I’m definitely working towards ideas raised in that conversation. Besides, who am I to go against a proven method that’s working for him.

Also in the mix is my brother. He’s started a clothing line, ASONE Clothing which has been doing well for small startup company. Also while doing that, he’s become somewhat of a wordpress guru. Couple that with his design abilities and he’s perfect for those wanting design work done. Right now his client list is pretty full and his ability to both code, not just CSS, full-on custom PHP and plugin integration as wel, is going to continue to bring him a lot of work. You can check out his budding portfolio over at PaperTree Design.

He also runs a few blogs on the side related to web design and creating buzz for product launches.

All in all, this online crowd is a great crowd to get into. I hope to develop my network more and more as I try and bring more information to the table. Some things I’m helping colleagues with are…

• Wordpress and PHP consulting, focused on custom wordpress applications and design
• SEO
• Starting and building blog networks
• Idea generation

I’ve been doing a bit of researching on business models and plans for building an online media and entertainment company and stumbled across a few interesting articles about Weblogs, Inc.’s early days when Jason Calacanis was a pie in the sky dreamer it seems like.

The article was found from this reporting and deals with the critique of Weblogs, Inc.’s business plan. The critique was done way back in 2003 by Nick Denton when Weblogs, Inc was first starting out and Jason had big plans for how he was going pay bloggers with revenue share. (Nick Denton is the publisher behind Gawker Media.)

The article sites an early wired news article about the beginnings of weblog empires and how Calacanis want[ed] to take the industry (which was just starting and what he knew little about) and turn it into a money making machine.)

The articles are filled with doubts and rightly so. It appears Calacanis knew little about the blog world. However, as I’ve said in many conversations outside of this blog, a blog is just a fancy name for a newspaper or magazine which is just a media reporting medium and entertainment delivery system. Jason had been around for a while, through the bubble of the late nineties, starting Silicon Alley Reporter, and involved with the media and entertainment businesses and bringing them online.

Very interesting reads about all the early talk of what blogs could someday become. Even Jeff Jarvis of the great buzz machine had in on the talks of a weblog network when he spoke of Calacanis, Bubble Boy, and a crazy idea.

Some of you familiar with Microsoft Office Applications know of the flow chart and process mapping program called Microsoft Visio. It’s a great program that has a lot of standards, templates, and useability options that make it useful in a lot of situations.

I use it in my biotech position to map engineering processes and actual fluid flow. I’ve heard of others who use Visio in “mind mapping” and brainstorming processes to build ideas into projects and product development cycles.

The only problem is that Visio costs a bit of money. For those of you addicted to free web applications, forking over the money to buy a Microsoft product probably isn’t on your top priority. You need other solutions.

Well I did a little hunting around and found two free web applications for just those purposes, flow charts and brain storming.

The first one is called Gliffy and I really hope this application gets picked up by Google in the near future. It’d be a great addition to the Google Free Web Apps. (Although I really hope Google builds more connectivity into their apps and allows users to cut and paste their favorite portions from each app) Anyway, Gliffy is just like Visio and has a lot of built in capabilities to help you diagram flow processes. Try it out.

The next web app that I think you should try out is Bubbl.us. It’s a brainstorming web application, also free that gives users another interactive ability to create brainstorming on the fly, also would be a nice tool to add to Google and allow collaboration through Google Talk to have easy web conferences. Although I haven’t tried the sharing action in Bubbl.us I’m not sure it has real-time sharing like Google Documents does.

Either of these applications can be a big help to those of you who are visual planners and need to see the way things connect together to get a real sense for how they work. These two web applications should be in your toolbox if you’re making the switch to all online medium of communication.

It seems like everyone these days considers themselves an entrepreneur. Take me for example, am I an entrepreneur? I’d like to think I have the entrepreneur mindset. But most “businesses” I’ve built over the years I would consider small businesses, not entrepreneurial endeavors.

If I wasn’t there, they would cease to make money. That’s more a definition for a small business owner. Also, nothing I’ve done has been really innovative. Sure, I was the first in my elementary to buy a tub of candy from Sam’s Club and sell it on the bus. But that’s nothing more innovative than the local dime store. And if I wasn’t there, I sure wasn’t making money!

I’m not writing this to call anyone out. I merely trying to get people to see that they may not be entrepreneur’s in the traditional sense but rather small business owners trying to make a living working for themselves.

To become an entrepreneur, it’s my opinion that you have to utilize a business system or change the way a current system works, or create a completely new system, or, do all of the above.

In my opinion a true entrepreneur is creating money from other peoples work as well as thinking of something that is new an original. If you have a network of sites, that if you left for a year, would cease to run and make you no money, you might not be an entrepreneur.

Just some food for thought to keep you going towards financial freedom.