Woody Allen Returns

Woody Allen is filming in my patio along with about 50 set people. They have simulated a bright sunny day by installing huge lights on my staircase, which means that I am trapped in this basement office. There is a massive bee heaving itself between the light fixtures in my office. Jeff is bravely doing his research trying to ignore the bee, I have turned off the lights above my desk in a cowardly attempt to keep the bee on Jeff’s side of the office.

In my old job I would have called the guys in the facilities office to take care of the bee. It’s hard to be an entrepreneur. Once a four-year-old friend said, about swimming with your head under water, that you have to “be bwave”. I think about being “bwave” when the thousand details of business ownership seem overwhelming.

Mostly I love the experience of entrepreneurship. In many ways I feel connected to more people as a business owner than I did as an employee, a phenomenon I attribute to the blogosphere. Instead of me, Jeff and the bee today, it feels like me, Jeff, the bee, and several thousand of my closest online friends. I bet, if I took the time, I would find a listserve whose aficionados would recommend the best way to maintain a bee-free office.

New research circulated by PR Week today further unmasks the blogger. It turns out that Hispanics are much more likely than others to blog. According to BIGresearch, the average blogger is male, 37.6 years old, a libertarian, unmarried, lower income, and uses a cell phone. What’s most interesting about the research is that almost 25% of registered voters blog, marking a serious increase in political blogs.

Beyond blogging, new technologies help make small organizations appear more prominent. Camino PR has just begun using interactive press releases - which means that reporters can mouse over sections of the release and get pop up windows that include photos, related web sites, citations, video, and more. New distribution mechanisms spend as much time making sure a client’s information gets to the right bloggers and websites as it does putting the release in the hands of traditional reporters.

It’s not like computers can take care of life’s mundane tasks, like filing all my tax receipts in the right folder. But I am wildly more efficient as a small business owner than I was as an employee, given that these tools have become my expanded workforce.

Someone yelled, “That’s a wrap!” upstairs and now there is loud equipment dismantling on the staircase. The bee is resting on the light. I am wondering how long a very fat bee can live. It’s Friday; will it die over the weekend? Should I try to push it out the door or would it attack me right back? Should I kill the bee, and if so, how? Among our environmentally friendly products are there any that would choke a bee?