http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog The Good Business Blog Fri, 16 May 2008 13:13:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It's about time! The House voted against war funding (because the Republicans, for their own reasons, sat out the vote)--and the Senate voted to block more media consolidation. Now, we've got to put enough pressure that these very positive actions are mirrored in the respective other chambers. My question: what happens if ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/some-good-news-from-capitol-hill-for-a-change/2008/05/16/ Watch out for these snakes! Some people have no ethics at all. I got an email this morning that purported to be from the IRS. The subject was "2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. [Scanned]" And it started like this: Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as part of The White House program to jumpstart ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/nastiest-phishing-scam-ive-seen-in-a-while-beware/2008/05/15/ Fascinating and far-ranging interview with European philosopher Slavoj Zizek on Democracy Now this morning. He covered war, energy, US presidential politics, and much more. But the statement that really got to me was: A true act creates the conditions of its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/an-action-creates-its-own-possibllity-slavoj-zizek/2008/05/13/ By some weird coincidence, both Seth Godin and David Garfinkel (names well known to any student of modern marketing) went after the media for distorting the news to artificially create drama this week. Godin, posting today, looked at CNN's report on yesterday's Indiana and North Carolina primaries, and found the headline ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/godin-and-garfinkel-take-on-the-press/2008/05/08/ More on the scandal I wrote about Sunday regarding the Pentagon's shills infiltrating the media in the run-up to the Iraq war. This from Jim Lehrer's Online News Report. Lehrer's guest was John Stauber, founder/executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy and author of Weapons of Mass Deception: The ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/pentagon-propaganda-campaign-clearly-illegal-cmd/2008/05/07/ Two related stories that I found in the Romensko news-about-newspapers newsletter. First, on Journalism.org, that the WSJ is shifting a lot of its front page coverage away from finance and toward politics and international news. and second, one columnist on the Recovering Journalist blog speculates, very cogently, that Rupert Murdoch ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/murdochs-ownership-of-the-wall-street-journal-shifts-focus-is-he-taking-on-the-ny-times/2008/05/04/ A recent front-page story in the New York Times reveals that the Pentagon has gone far beyond paying Armstrong Williams. A whole gaggle of retired military leaders posing as neutral pundits turn out to have been under the sway of the Pentagon: Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/military-pundits-didnt-disclose-they-were-embedded/2008/05/04/ Last night was the twice-a-year Town Meeting in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts. We still have an old-style New England Town Meeting, where any registered voter can speak (about issues already on the agenda, anyway) and vote. And these votes really do shape the town; every zoning change, for instance, ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/direct-democracyin-person-and-online/2008/05/02/ I recently purchased a copy of Paul Hancox's ebook, "Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate" from copywriting superstar Michel Fortin. You probably already know that most direct mail and PPC convert at somewhere between zero and five percent, so getting up to 10 is huge. I tell my clients they ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/flow-testing-an-alternative-to-the-alternative/2008/04/27/ Just stumbled across a fascinating article by Malcolm Gladwell, the brilliant and bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, on the ethical issues he faces as a journalist who also writes books and also gives speeches. Among other things, he notes the latitude he has as a staff writer ... http://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/gladwell-defining-the-ethics-lines-in-journalism-book-writing-speaking/2008/04/25/