With the Long Tail redefining business and opening opportunities for small business growth, it is easy to forget what happens at the other end of the scale. With Google announcing that they have 550,000 activations of their cell phone operating system Android, per day, I almost fell of my chair.

And that number is up from 500,000 per day just a month ago. If it is possible to keep growing like this, they will be at over a million activations per day in six months.

And still, the sum of all business in the long tail is still greater than all the mega businesses together.

If you thoughts are going towards shedding the thin veil of security provided by corporate employment and making a leap towards running your own business, and your life, this is a must-read book.

You can read more about Jeff Levy and his fellow author David Nilssen at www.makingthejumpbook.com.

Note – not only does the book have 5 stars on Amazon, right now there is only 1 book left in stock – obviously very popular!

Order the book now…

Well, the software is open source and anyone can download it from http://wordpress.org and run it off their computer. And for anyone somewhat technically savvy, it shouldn’t be beyond reason to get an installation up and running.

For the person who doesn’t want to do any installation, he or she can go for the quicker chioce of using http://wordpress.com which provides an already-running installation to use.

So why do I even ask the question? Have you heard the expression “free as a puppy”? I.e. even if you get a puppy for free, you have a lifetime (dog lifetime that is) of commitment to feed it, walk it, pet it and generally love it. If you love the dog, that is no burden, but if it is your spouse’s dog, you may not think it is without cost…

That is a bit what WordPress is. It is a friend, but a friend that required attention and effort. If that is not for you, get a cat!

Realistically, if you are considering a WordPress installation for your company website or your blog, there are costs associated. Several costs to be honest…

Here is a post that lists some of the hard costs: http://backwardwebsites.com/2011/what-does-a-wordpress-website-cost/.

Do you agree with the claim that a WordPress site costs between? $1,287 and $22,487?

In short, SocialTables allows an event organizer to layout the tables at the gathering, and then place the guests at their seats by simply dragging and dropping them in place.

It is such a simple task to drag and drop the icons of the guests that I am sure many hours will be spent figuring out how to place people – becuase the hardest challenge still remains – who goes next to who…

The tool also adds a set of features allowing the attendees to connect and engage before the event, or to stay connected after.

Several things led to my decision, including these:

• as I am out touting social media, I often get nodding heads but most people say they need to get a professional website in place first – I reached a point when I didn’t think I should give up on these opportunities
• I met with some seriously interesting people when I recently visited Sweden, one was an investigative journalist and photographer, the other was a music producer that has introduced some revolutionary business model. Both of these gentlemen have proven to be ahead of their time, and they are very inspiring. As they are building out a business focused on training around open source, with WordPress at the center, I really felt compelled to join in. Their business model includes the offering of building websites from ready-made themes, which is sort of backwards since you start with a finished site and then populate it with content – this actually gave name to the new business name: http://backwardwebsites.com.
• Since I started my career as a software developer, I thought it time to catch up on what modern software has to offer – it is actually really fun to code, at least for someone who is a geek at heart. And in all honestly, PHP and WordPress development are much easier than the assembler and C I grew up with. When you add the open source libraries that are available it really makes development fast.

I could probably continue to list reasons, but the short of it is that http://backwardwebsites.com now offers WordPress sites at great prices and quick delivery. Give me a holler and we’ll talk about it!

I just joined the professional networking site Viadeo. While it has 35 million members it is strongest in Europe and Asia, which is probably why I didn’t know of the service until recently.

I have added a rudimentary profile to http://viadeo.com/en/profile/hakan.soderbom. I expect it will take me some time to explore all the features, however I have to ask myself – how many social sites can I realistically be active on?

What is your experience with Viadeo? Is it a real competitor to LinkedIn?