“Can you improve your conversation skills? Certainly. It might take a while to change the conversation habits that’s been ingrained throughout your life, but it is very possible. To not make this article longer than necessary let’s just skip right to some common mistakes many of us have made in conversations. And a couple of solutions.”

“A behind-the-scenes look at selling dropsend.com.” Ryan and Gil Carson is blog all the gory details — costs, profits, motivations, user stats and more — in an attempt to go almost completely transparent.

“The salient question that Mike answers is, ‘How do I get my company in TechCrunch?’ The short story is: 1. The ’standard answer’ is to send an email to editor [at] techcrunch.com and take your chances. Thirty pitches come in per day this way. 2. The most effective way is to get a referral from a venture capitalist or someone ‘known’ who can speak on your behalf. Ten per come per day this way. Thirty plus ten equals forty, and he runs four stories per day, so you might think that ten percent make it. However, many of his stories are internally generated (followups, reports on what big companies do, etc.), so the actual percentage is much less.”

“What is the hardest thing that company boards have to do? I can answer this with considerable authority, having been on a board for all of two months. The hardest thing is not strategy. It isn’t complying with hundreds of petty regulations. It isn’t setting the chief executive’s pay, or even sacking him. Doubtless, these things can be hard. But harder is arranging to meet at all.”

“Even if you’re not a genius, you can use the same strategies as Aristotle and Einstein to harness the power of your creative mind and better manage your future. The following eight strategies encourage you to think productively, rather than reproductively, in order to arrive at solutions to problems. These strategies are common to the thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art, and industry throughout history.”

“Taking control of your finances is easier when the rest of your life is in order. If your mind is swamped with worries about work, or home improvement projects, or obligations to friends and family, personal finance can become a low priority. You have other Stuff to worry about. David Allen’s Getting Things Done provides a system for tackling all of the Stuff in your life. I’ve avoided mentioning Getting Things Done before today. But I’m currently writing a couple of articles that will make more sense if you’re familiar the concept, so an introduction is in order.”

“Email is fantastic. We use it to stay in touch with friends, contact clients, and handle support requests. It’s easy to use, low cost, and less intrusive than a phone call or meeting. But with email being such an integral part of our lives, are we using it as effectively as possible? To find out, have a look at the techniques these articles recommend on ensuring that your messages are read.”

“Think dove’s ‘campaign for Real Beauty’ generated a ton of buzz for relatively little expense? You haven’t seen anything yet… With not a penny of paid media and in less than a month, ‘Dove Evolution,’ a 75-second viral film created by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, for the Unilever brand has reaped more than 1.7 million views on YouTube and has gotten significant play on TV talk shows ‘Ellen’ and ‘The View’ as well as on ‘Entertainment Tonight.’ It’s also brought the biggest-ever traffic spike to CampaignForRealBeauty.com, three times more than Dove’s Super Bowl ad and resulting publicity last year, according to Alexa.com.”

“I first saw this posted on the Pho List. A media related list that I have participated in for years with lots of smart people with great insights. The posting, as you will read is fascinating and was originally posted anonymously. I emailed the list asking for permission to post it on my blog… I cant say this has been fact checked. It hasnt. I cant say its 100 pct accurate, I dont know. But it rings true, and as I said, I trust the source…”