The Huffington Post is already getting shredded in the blogosphere for stooping to a new low: A summer swimsuit edition disguised as a feature about eco-chic.

Given how hard it is to survive as an online news and opinion publisher, and given the sorry state of the traditional journalism world, you'd think more people would regard this as a perfectly reasonable way to support some more serious fare.

Especially because no one is actually forced to look at swimsuit editions.  And especially because, although they protest vehemently to the contrary, this sort of thing is exactly what people actually want to read (clicks don't lie).

Two recent trends are making it more expensive to make goods in China.

Wages, especially in the more developed southern part of the country, are going up as the country becomes more prosperous. Work in factories that pay less than a dollar-per-hour aren't as attractive relative to other opportunities as they once were, and international scrutiny of conditions in Foxconn's facilities in particular have forced further wage hikes.

Secondly, after years of keeping its currency cheap to promote exports, China is allowing the Yuan to appreciate, making it more expensive for foreign companies to do business there.

While it may be hip to say otherwise, your small business needs a Web site. The same way you can’t ignore your blog for social media, you can’t ignore your site in lieu of a Twitter account. You may spend your afternoons engaging with people on social sites, however it’s your site that users will turn to for trusted information about what you do, how you do it, and how they can get it. But before you go just throwing something together, remember they’re looking for trusted information.

The Web site you create can’t help you if it doesn’t appear trustworthy to users. And that means more than just creating a professional design (though that helps). It means taking time to lay the foundation from the very beginning.

Here are 11 reasons customers won’t trust your Web site. It’s the what NOT to do.

In today’s competitive market, companies that incorporate social and green policies can leave a lasting impression on the consumer. As Sofia Ribeiro pointed out in her post Using Community Involvement as Part of Your Green Marketing and CSR Strategy, a Cone Inc. survey revealed that 83% of people will trust a company more if it is socially/environmentally responsible. With this in mind, how do companies go about communicating their best initiatives?

Recently, Perry Goldschein took the podium at Sustainable Brands 2010 to talk about the seven best practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR). As the founding partner of SDialogue LLC, a strategic sustainability communications firm, Perry provided insights on how to engage your consumers and stakeholders. Follow this recap with CSR’s Seven Best Practices to learn how to put your organization’s best social and environmental practices in the spotlight:

Call it the Catch-22 of startup life.

You need talented employees to help grow your business. But without enough cash flow, you can’t get the money to pay them.

“It’s the dilemma every early-stage company faces,” says Rosalind Resnick, CEO of Axxess Business Consulting in New York.

Certainly, you might be willing to work 24-7 with little financial reward for many months. But you can’t expect an employee to do the same.

So how can you compensate the top-level talent you need to boost your business?

Why is Madison (Wisconsin) doing so much better than Ann Arbor (Michigan)? Michigan Future looks at the differences between the two college towns. Lou Glazer explains why Ann Arbor must look to Portland (Oregon) for answers:

Just like people in a bar or other noisy location, North American right whales increase the volume of their calls as environmental noise increases; and just like humans, at a certain point, it may become too costly to continue to shout, according to marine and acoustic scientists.

“The impacts of increases in ocean noise from human activities are a concern for the conservation of marine animals like right whales,” said Susan Parks, assistant professor of acoustics and research associate, Applied Research Laboratory, Penn State. “The ability to change vocalizations to compensate for environmental noise is critical for successful communication in an increasingly noisy ocean.”

Right whales are large baleen whales that often approach close to shore. They may have been given the name because they were the right whales to hunt as they are rich in blubber, slow swimming and remain afloat after death. Consequently, whalers nearly hunted these whales to extinction. Currently right whales are monitored to determine the health and size of the population. The northern and southern right whales are on the endangered species list.

Amid the worst job market in a generation, increasing numbers of unemployed Long Islanders are embracing entrepreneurship as the only way back to employment.

"I like the idea of being more in control of everything," said Beth Granger of Port Washington, who lost her job in a restructuring in April after 17 years with a large Long Island manufacturing company.

Granger recently visited the Bethpage office of the Service Corps of Retired Executives, a volunteer business advisory group, to explore the idea of partnering with someone to open a digital marketing agency, even while she continues to look for another job.

IF THE private sector continues to save hard even as governments try to borrow less, the risks of a double-dip recession rise. A long period of high household saving seems assured in rich countries whose consumers lived off credit and have heavy debt burdens to show for it. But much of the recent increase in private-sector savings comes not from consumers but from businesses. Profits have been more than enough to cover corporate spending in many parts of the rich world, leaving an excess of funds for firms to squirrel away. A lot depends on whether this continues.

If cautious firms pile up more savings, the prospects for recovery are poor. Economies will be stuck in the current—and odd—configuration where corporate surpluses fund government deficits. If firms loosen their purse-strings to hire workers and to invest, that will allow governments to scale back their borrowing.

Multimedia—dangerous!

Online research—depthless!

Classroom screens—dubious!

If you're looking for a contrarian take on technology, Nicholas Carr is your man. In 2003 the author touched off a debate about the role of computers in business with his article "IT Doesn't Matter." He caused another kerfuffle five years later with an Atlantic piece, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Now the 51-year-old, Colorado-based writer has published a new book, The Shallows, which warns that the Internet is rewiring our brains and short-circuiting our ability to think. The Chronicle called Mr. Carr to get his opinion about what this means for teaching and research.

Q. The idea of neuroplasticity is central to your argument. What does this mean, and what does it have to do with how the Internet is changing our brains?

In the weeks since the Entrepreneurial Revolution article appeared in HBR, government leaders, business executives, entrepreneurs, NGO directors, heads of institutes, university professors, and foundations have been asking me to help them instigate a revolution. Here is my advice to all of you on how to get started in just six months.

1. Revolutions start local. Start the revolution in one locale and spread it from there. Every ecosystem has its own idiosyncrasies, and skepticism is prevalent, so start with quick wins that make sense in that specific location. And make quick correctable mistakes. Once you get on the right track in one locale, you can spread the revolution quickly. You don't have years to wait for measurable results before scaling up, just know you are on the right track.
2. Revolutions need participants. The "shot heard round the world" will be a town-meeting-style, entrepreneurship stakeholder workshop to create excitement and commitment, and to learn. Convene representatives of banks, churches, universities, public schools, unions, cooperatives, entrepreneurs, the municipal and federal government, trade and industry associations, economic development organizations, some "foreign" diaspora resources, and the media. Meet with them individually to prepare them, and learn about the assets and liabilities of the local entrepreneurship ecosystem.

The presence of strong gusts and flat, wide-open spaces would appear tailor-made for the production of electricity from wind energy, yet the reality of harvesting renewable energy is never that straightforward. As Scientific American reported last week, Latin America is beginning to tap into the wind as a source of clean (or at least not fossil fuel-derived) energy. But further investigation into the situation in Colombia reveals the difficulties inherent in building out a wind-energy infrastructure.

Despite the successful 15-turbine Jepírachi Wind Project (pdf) in the country's northern La Guajira Desert, Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), one of the country's largest utilities, says it has no plans to expand Jepírachi at this time. Whereas the project has been delivering electricity to Colombia's national grid since 2004, EPM is finding that wind power is more expensive to deliver than the hydropower that provides 70 percent of the country's energy needs, EPM spokesman Luis Fernando Rodriguez said in an e-mail to Scientific American translated from Spanish.

How much money do you put away each month toward retirement? Maybe you sock away all you can, already dreaming of that Florida condo. Or maybe you can’t even imagine where you’ll be then, what you’ll want to use the money for, even what you’ll be like: when you think about yourself far in the future, it’s almost like thinking about someone else. A growing body of work suggests that the more you feel your future self is really you, the more you’ll put in his or her—whoops, your—bank account.

When making decisions, we often treat our future self the way we would treat another person, found a study in 2008 by Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin. People in the study often shied away from doing something helpful but unpleasant when they had to do it right at that moment. But when their help was needed a few months or a year down the line, they were more likely to sign up—just as likely as they were to suggest that someone else should help out.

A lovely new company/customer etiquette has emerged, and small startups are especially suited for exploiting it. I hope you’re not ignoring it.

Just yesterday someone explained to me what they expect from their website hosting company: “I want someone else making sure the server doesn’t go down. Or, if it does go down, I want someone to apologize to me.”

Ten years ago, that italicized text would have read: “Or, if it does go down, I want someone to scream at.” Or: “I want someone to give me a refund.”  The new attitude is not “Those assholes better not ever screw up,” but rather “I expect them to try hard, to care, and to treat me well when they inevitably screw up.”

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.), July 7, 2010 – When it comes to U.S. job growth, startup companies aren’t everything. They’re the only thing. It’s well understood that existing companies of all sizes constantly create – and destroy – jobs. Conventional wisdom, then, might suppose that annual net job gain is positive at these companies. A study released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, however, shows that this rarely is the case. In fact, net job growth occurs in the U.S. economy only through startup firms.

The new study, The Importance of Startups in Job Creation and Job Destruction, bases its findings on the Business Dynamics Statistics, a U.S. government dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. The BDS series tracks the annual number of new businesses (startups and new locations) from 1977 to 2005, and defines startups as firms younger than one year old.

The study reveals that, both on average and for all but seven years between 1977 and 2005, existing firms are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year. By contrast, in their first year, new firms add an average of 3 million jobs.
Further, the study shows, job growth patterns at both startups and existing firms are pro-cyclical, although existing firms have much more cyclical variance. Most notably, during recessionary years, job creation at startups remains stable, while net job losses at existing firms are highly sensitive to the business cycle.

Most Americans still don't use the mobile Internet, but it's growing rapidly, according to new research from Pew.

Some 34% of cellphone owners polled this year send and receive email on their mobile devices, up about one-third from 25% last year. Some 38% "access the Internet," also up from about 25% last year.

And a third of cellphone owners play music on their devices, up more than half from last year. Thank Apple's iPhone -- and Google Android phones with better music players -- for that one.

Business-plan competitions have fostered a "contest economy" that promotes start-up activity and much-needed innovation.

Puneet Mehta, Archana Patchirajan, and Sonpreet Bhatia all had lucrative day jobs as technologists at big Wall Street firms when they learned about the NYC BigApps competition last October. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg was calling on software developers to create mobile apps based on newly released city data. The two-month deadline gave the three Indian-born developers the incentive to build out an idea they had only talked about before. After 40 days, they had a one-stop application called NYC Way, which puts a compendium of city information at users' fingertips.

Their efforts were rewarded with $5,500 in cash prizes, a meeting with the mayor, and an overwhelmingly positive public reception for their product, which has become a popular download through Apple's App Store. Encouraged, the three partners quit their jobs and co-founded a business called MyCityWay, which now markets similar apps for seven additional cities and multiple platforms, earning revenue through partnerships. In April, the company received $300,000 in seed money from the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a new city fund set up to invest in start-ups. The company expects to make its first hires this summer.

As large parts of the world economy lurch from the slings and arrows of outrageous financial and fiscal crises, the inevitable question is what is to be done.

The pamphlet of the same name   ⁴, written by Lenin in 1902, called for the formation of a revolutionary vanguardist party.

Well, it is claimed that we live in revolutionary times as these crises have turned our economic complacency on its head, as all that was formerly solid seems to have melted into air.

An innovation tool is a cognitive prosthetic that helps individuals and groups overcome their human limitations to innovate more capably. Just as an artificial limb or hearing aid compensates and augments a missing or impaired part of the body, a thinking tool does the same – it compensates and augments for a variety of cognitive deficiencies in all humans.

Yet there is an aversion to using a structured tool to be creative:

• The Arts: Musicians, poets, and graphic artists shun the idea of using a standard tool or template because it makes them appear less creative to their fans and the public. But consider Paul McCartney who sold more albums in the U.S. than anyone. In his biography, he confided: “As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough: it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song. I hate the word but it was the template.” Listen carefully to artist, Jackson Pollock, describe his approach: