One Man Band

Internet Sign Buy From Art.com

Ending the second week of 2009, I have settled into the new year and have time to quietly review my goals without a lot of distractions.

As a one-person business, I can’t afford things that don’t pay for themselves in some fashion. So one of my big goals for this first month of the new year is to review any and all paid services, analyze whether the service is carrying its weight as a revenue or information stream and decide whether to keep it or chop it.

Closely related: a review of free services. Each service requires time and attention, the coin of the freeware realm. But if a service doesn’t return something worth the time and attention, it should be dropped.

With “lean and mean” in mind, here are a couple of articles worth reading.

First, courtesy of TechMeme, Drama 2.0 looks at Web 2.0 stars still sucking down venture capital money long past their sell-by date.

An excerpt:

Instead of following the lean-and-mean philosophy that Web 2.0 proponents promote, Web 2.0’s biggest stars have opted to put revenue models on the back burner. Instead, they’ve raised large amounts of capital at exorbitant valuations under the guise of supporting “growth” and achieving “critical mass.” They figured that the revenue and profits would come eventually but clearly that was putting the cart before the horse.

My own personal gripe about many Web 2.0 apps (including Twitter) is that a security model (encompassing both authentication and authorization — known collectively as authx) is often thought about long after even revenue and profits, if ever.

Second, courtesy of Network World (via Stevel Rubel on Twitter), Carolyn Duffy Marsan suggests technology to master, but not at the tech-geek level.

An excerpt:

This list is not for geeks. It’s for IT professionals of a certain age, who don’t spend every waking hour online but need to keep up with the latest innovations on the Internet.

Master these Web sites, and you’ll prove you can innovate during the most trying economic times. And you’ll do it more efficiently than your 20-something employees, who waste too much time chasing the new, new thing on the Internet that may not survive the downturn.

The list is useful for one-person online businesses for the same reasons. From the article’s list, I already use (actually, underuse) LinkedIn (my LinkedIn profile name is cehwiedel — ask me to link!), Secunia (online security is a personal burr), Twitter (follow me: @cehwiedel) and Ruby on Rails (a thing of beauty to this programming geek).

It’s important to keep up with new developments, so that you can decide whether a particular new development merits adding to your online business.

Just remember: revenue, profitability, security.

It’s business, after all.