“Take a trip around the world to discover how easy (or difficult) it is to do business in 175 countries. Click on green, yellow or red placemarks to learn more about each country… The World Bank Group’s Doing Business project aims to provide objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 175 countries.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

“Margie Zable Fisher runs theprsite.com. Every day someone tells her that he or she has been ‘burned’ by a PR firm, and Margie’s goal is to help small business find the right PR firm. I asked her to provide the top ten reasons why PR doesn’t work…”

“Trial and error are usually the prime means of solving life’s problems. Yet many people are afraid to undertake the trial because they’re too afraid of experiencing the error. They make the mistake of believing that all error is wrong and harmful, when most of it is both helpful and necessary. Error provides the feedback that points the way to success. Only error pushes people to put together a new and better trial, leading through yet more errors and trials until they can ultimately find a viable and creative solution. To meet with an error is not to fail, but to take one more step on the path to final success. No errors means no successes either.”

“I was recently ‘let go’ from my job of three years for violating my employee agreement for allegedy working on a side business and not properly disclosing this to my employer. In addition, I’m now fighting my employer’s claim that because I did some writing on my blog during work hours, my startup’s IP is their property.”

“One of the benefits of using a dedicated email application like Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird is the ability to send emails which included rich HTML signatures. These email signatures are easily recognizeable and often include hyperlinks, images, or a combination of the two. Although Gmail users could easily access their accounts via POP allowing for HTML emails, web-based users are were forced to use plain text signatures. For quite some time, I yearned for the ability to add a little more personality to my emails. Unfortunately, because I managed all my email accounts via Gmail’s web interface, the option was non-existent. That was until I discovered the Better Gmail Firefox extension.”

“Meeting management tends to be a set of skills often overlooked by leaders and managers. The following information is a rather ‘Cadillac’ version of meeting management suggestions. The reader might pick which suggestions best fits the particular culture of their own organization. Keep in mind that meetings are very expensive activities when one considers the cost of labor for the meeting and how much can or cannot get done in them. So take meeting management very seriously.”

“WhoDoes is a fresh and intuitive web-based project management system. WhoDoes is designed to assist you and your team in planning projects of different complexity, from the small project to the biggest one. With WhoDoes you can manage your activities and share information with your team, whether you are in the same office or distributed all over the World.”

“You would be wise to listen to the customers you’re threatening to sue — they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn’t be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark. All of which is to say — no amount of fear can stop the rise of free media, or free software (they are the same, after all). The community is vastly more innovative and powerful than a single company.”

“The message of Mark Hurst’s new book, Bit Literacy: In an age of infinite bits, time and attention are the scarce resources. The solution is to constantly manage your bits with the goal of reaching an ‘empty’ state. Hurst offers practical, opinionated advice on how to get to zero. Just like in his Uncle Mark’s shopping guides, he doesn’t shy away from taking a stand. It’s nice to read someone who says “do it this way” instead of being wishy-washy.”

“1. Million Dollar Homepage: 1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.”

“A short guide to what works and what doesn’t when talking to reporters.”

“Effective today, DreamHost is now a carbon-neutral company. That’s awesome! But what does it mean?… It means a few things, actually! It means we’ve calculated our carbon footprint. Our footprint represents the impact of everything that DreamHost uses and leaves behind in the course of our daily work. All of the resources that we use - paper in the office, electricity for our 1300+ servers, even the gas in our cars that bring us to the office - leaves behind some kind of soul-sucking residue in the world.”

“In many respects, changing careers is like dumping your significant other. It’s a lot easier to do than solving the problems you’re facing. But in so many cases, hard work and self-knowledge could solve most of the problems. And I have found — in both careers and relationships — that if I get through a tough spot, I learn way more about myself and the world than if I had left and started over.”

“Unclutterer is the website for home and office organization. It’s not just for the helplessly disorganized who would lose their head if it wasn’t attached to them, and pack rats looking to put their stashes on a diet, but also for obsessive compulsive neat freaks looking to squeeze even more order into their lives. We hope we can make getting and staying organized fun and informative.”

“I just got back from the Economics of Social Media conference put on by Rafat Ali, Staci Kramer, and the rest of the PaidContent crew and it was really an excellent event… The only awful thing about EconSM though — as is the case with most conferences — was the design of the conference badges. While talking to Andy Sternberg of LAist, at one point I interrupted him and said: ‘You know super-complicated innovation would double the amount of socializing going on in this lobby? Double the size of the badges. I can’t frickin’ see anyone’s name.’ Andy agreed.”