At the conjuncture of the financial-services sector and cash-starved IT entrepreneurs are ...VCs

Businesses starting up or anxious to enter new fields in the internet-technics sector mite want to meet h+ ranking representatives of these companies from a certain niche of the financial-services sector. This "niche" is an industry, a number of whose corporations appear on the following list of participants in a recent event:

▪ 3i
▪ Arch Venture Partners
▪ Atlas Accelerator
▪ Bank of America
▪ Clearstone Venture Partners
▪ Divergent Ventures
▪ El Dorado Ventures
▪ First Round Capital
▪ Foundation Capital
▪ Frazier Technology Ventures
▪ Granite Global Ventures
▪ Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
▪ Lehman Brothers Venture Partners
▪ OVP Venture Partners
▪ Paladin Partners
▪ Partech International
▪ Polaris Venture Partners
▪ SeaPoint Ventures
▪ Sierra Ventures
▪ Sunriver Ventures
▪ Voyager Capital
▪ Vulcan

That's what we're told by Read-Write Web email newsletter in "Amazon, VCs woo Seattle-area Developers" (Apr27,2k7).

While here I am most interested in showing simply the nexus of two industrial sectors (financial-services and internet-technics) of a given national economy (in this case, USA) and a regional economy (in this case, Silicon Valley / Seattle), where cross-fertiilization takes place between the two, and where the specialized companies of the one are looking for mates in the second with whom to place the funds of the first's investors; I am also interested in simply displaying a population for the first industry's specialist companies. These are direct competitors with one another, and thus are members together of a specialist subsector of a sector of an economy (both national and in this assemblage, regional too). The sector, as mentioned, is financial-services; the subsector is venture-capital services which is made up of Venture Capital companies, hence VCs); and a selection of the population of the first sector/subsector (which has been assembled in one region of the other sector, IT) is displayed above.

Now, the specifics of the event are not without interest, but R/WW's discussion centers around one of the hosts, Amazon (principally still defined by its originating role in the online [IT] subsector of the retail-sales sector), and and around Amazon's own possible future venture-capital role.

If you're already familiar with the Amazon Web Services pitch, there wasn't much new in the presentation. However, a question and answer session led by Andy Jassy, Senior VP of AWS, to clarify that Amazon is in fact building a distinct line of operation with its own investments and not using idle capacity [that otherwise would] sit... around until the next Christmas season, was interesting. True, they have not yet opened up Elastic Cloud Computing, but the servers currently running EC2 are dedicated for that purpose.

Some Take-aways

One participant wondered why Amazon hasn't started its own venture capital arm to make strategic investments in their AWS platform. Then we looked around the room and noticed all the engaged VC representatives and came to the conclusion [that Amazon] didn't need to [launch an arm of its own in the VC subsector of the financial-services sector].

The question of 'What happens if [some] Big Company moves in on this space?' is becoming more common, and the big company on everyone's mind in this part of the world (Seattle) is Microsoft. To this, the only thing the AWS folks could do was smile and claim first mover advantages. However Matt McIlwain of Madrona Venture Group mentioned that he had just returned from a Silicon Valley forum where people thought Microsoft simply can't ignore what's happening here much longer. I did hear a rumor that the first Microsoft data center has come online in the last month, and one can only speculate about Google and Akamai, so stay tuned...

I would only add a remark to link explicityly "we looked around the room and noticed all the engaged VC representatives" with mention of the larger companies Microsoft, Google, and Akamai: these latter are the competitors of one another and of the entire list of VCs taken as an ensemble. Surely, some parties to that VC list are thinking we've go to merge/acquire so as to be better able to both feed cash from investors to Amazon, for instance, and to compete with Microsoft, Google and Akamai. The nature of the market at the nexus of these two sectors is such that the little guys must form a conglomerate to add a fourth competitor to the top tier of three. I would suspect that Madrona VC realizes this, and realizes that Amazon would be the perfect mate for a new VC conglomerate capable of such competition with Microsoft, Google, and Akamai.

Retail sector: top 10 globally

Pursuant to our immediately preceding blog-entry, we shift to another sector of the global economic order via a note in Christian Science Monitor's daily email newsletter (Apr25,2k7; no link):

Retail wonders of the world: Surely you've shopped a few Ever stood in line at a major retailer and contemplated all the sales in even one business day? If so, consider this: Receipts at the world's 250 largest chain stores were $5.7 million a minute, or - if you prefer - $95,000 per second, during the latest period for which data are available. That's what global accounting giant Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, in conjunction with STORES magazine, found in compiling a list of megaretailers. The biggest of the big, based on revenue, was Wal-Mart Stores of Bentonville, Ark., which has about 6,400 outlets worldwide and reported more than $300 billion in sales revenues for the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2006. The world's largest retailers with the home country of each:

1.) Wal-Mart Stores ..... US - I've never been in one - E
2.) Carrefour SA .................... France
3.) Home Depot .... US - great store; one near my home Canada
4.) Metro AG ......................... Germany
5.) Tesco PLC ........................ Britain
6.) Kroger Co. ....................... US - Never
7.) Target Corp. .................... US - Never
8.) Costco Wholesale Corp. ........ US - Never
9.) Sears Holdings Corp. .. US - Customer both US and Canada
10.)Lidl&Schwarz Stiftung&Co .. Germany

There's a discernible pattern here, of course whereby a corporation whose governing offices are embedded in the national economy of one country by various means are sucessfully operative also in many other countries (where presumably those operations are also subject to that/those other/s/'s laws).

The subsidiary companies operative in other countries do not necessarily obey all the laws to which the mother company is held in the home country. This creates many problems, and provokes not only protests but also a juridical gap. There is no effective global law by which all mite be held accountable equally in a systematic economic way.

Update (Apr29,2k7): Noticing that all the top-ten listed are not online retailers, and using the common distinction between "brick-box retailers" and "online retailers" to establish two different subsectors of retailers, let's add an eleventh company not anywhere near the top-ten of the overall retail-sales sector. Our candidate is Amazon.com which is indeed very active internationally from its US hub with subsidiary companies in many other national economies, and plays a significant role in its sector as part of the global economic order. This insertion also allow us to anticipate and prepare for material in our next blog-entry:

11.) Amazon.com .... US - I'm a customer

Now, let's return to our original text for this blog-entry:

[For convenience, let's shift from the term "mother company" to "holding company" by which only Sears on our list designates itself.]

There is no effective systemic global economic law for the global economic order. Rather, binational and multinational treaties provide frameworks for out-of-country powers of the holding companies often subject only at home to the home country's laws, in many cases. Contracts are entered-into between companies in different countries, but it is often difficult for outsiders to those companies themselves, including the outsider-bureaucracies and law-enforcement agencies of the states involved, to determine where actually policy-making authority and agreements are actually concluded, from company to company, at the holding company level or the subsidary company level.

In passing, I note that Roman Catholic subsidiarity theory seems to offer no particular guidance or rationale for relations within companies operating under various guises on various levels of the global economic order. It remains to be seen whether Dooyeweerdian legal theory can offer uniquely any further lite on these problems around its contrasting theory (actually, priciple) of sphere specificity (sphere universality, sphere sovereignty).

Business categories a la Times [London, UK]

Following up on our previous blog-entry to establish as part of the pragmatics associated with our economics theorizing for USE (Utilize Synergic Enterprises--a game we are inventing as we go), we put forward a working set of bizcats regarding "sectors" (in various contexts we discovered expressions "economic sectors," "industrial sectors," and "business sectors" can all mean what we want simply to call "sectors"). In our usage/s, sectors are sectors of an economy (whether it's the global economic order or a specific national or regional economy); an economy is usually composed of sectors (in a hypothetical pure-monocultural economy there would be only one sector--let's say coffee cultivation, harvesting, and export).

Now, for symmetry's sake, we hypthesize that all sectors are composed of industries (so, strictly speaking, in our framework here there are no "industrial sectors," rather only sectors, subsectors perhaps, both in turn being composed of specific industries). Thus, in my extreme hypothetical of a pure mono(agri)culture, we could entertain an economy with only one sector where three industries derive from

1.) coffee growing (let's say, this subsector or particular industry is composed of 3,000 small-grower family-farms with hired hands,

2.) coffee-harvesting (let's say there are 20 companies that contract to harvest or that rent machinery for mechanized harvesting for some of the growers); and

3.) coffee-exporting (let's say, there are 4 companies that send trucks to the growers' farms with which they have contracts to load the sacked coffee beans, transport the product to the port city where only the same companies' ships harbour, load the unprocessed beans onto the coffee-export ships). And away they sail, let's say, to Bordeaux, France.

We could call this a single-sector coffee economy (monocultural) with three diverse industries within it--the coffee industry of small growers who are family-farmers (compare Herman Dooyeweerd, NCTT on the "family farm" as a hybrid of two different societal spheres ... the family and the farm as a business) some of whom employ hired hands seasonally, the second industry of mechanized coffee-harvesting companies, and the coffee industry specialized as trucking-shipping companies.

For any economy, judgment calls will have to be made to sort out what constitutes a sector, perhaps subsectors and/or industries, and finally companies. Of course the further complication arises often enuff, of multi-sectoral companies, multi-subsectoral companies, and multi-industry companies. The term "diversification" is often used to designate companies that exhibit these phenomena, these larger structural relationships to an economy from within it.

With all the foregoing discussion in mind, please now consider The Times's construction of a set of bizcats that, from my point of view here, wobbles between concepts of sector, subsector, and industry. How would you hierarchize an economics classifaction for each of the items below?

* Banking & Finance

* Construction & Property

* Consumer Goods

* Engineering

* Health

* Industrials

* Leisure

* Media

* Natural Resources

* Retailing

* Support Services

* Technology

* Telecoms

* Transport

* Utilities

A first try at understanding "sectors"--whether you call them 'economic,' 'industrial,' or 'business'

In this blog-entry I'm laying out some loose-ended notes toward building a sense of economic sectors, industrial sectors, or business sectors--whatever you may wish to call them, depending on the context in which your are making a single point--the sectoral point.

To initiate our thinking along this line, I'm going to select one possible way of designating a specific sector, as I build up my own personal email file with a myriad of newslinks that could possible constitute a category. The general file envelopes a set "Companies"--but I'm not seeking to constitute any sector by this designation. Rather, within the "Companies" file, I place all the emails that feature one specific company or another (usually). But between the specific companies files and the main collector file of the set, I've slowly generated a mid-level designation that could constitute a sector. Still, my designation is something of a grab bag the contents of which are analytically isolated from other grab bags.

"Financial and Accounting" sector

This mid-level designation for a sector, between top-level "Companies" and third-level for collector files for subsectors (occasionally) and then the bottom-level of specific companies. Within any subsector. Within the sector of "Financial and Accounting" companies. Within general file I maintain for "Companies."
You understand the filing and category-generating hierarchical system that is very much only a work in process. A file tree, you mite call it. Also, as to the method of creating the system and using it now for basic purposes trending/tending toward ontological categories ("ontocats"), still it is only part of a pragmatics toward understanding companies in an overall economics theory, taking into account how specific companies relate to a system of economic sectors (industrial sectors, business sectors).

Here's a list drawn up from what's actually lurking in my email files at present:

"Financial and Accounting" sector
Accounting - subsector
Banks - subsector
Private Equity - subsector
Stockbrokers - subsector

I don't pretend even to myself that the subsector list is complete, and I have the suspicion that a further subsector should be listed--namely, "Insurance - subsector." But I have been empirically confronted yet with emails specific to the Insurance industry's subsector (my guesstimate of its most responsible classification). In my pragmatics, I can decide the matter later one. Now let's drill down to a further level toward specificity regarding kinds of businesses according to there industrial subsectors and sectors, their economic sectors and subsectors according the focal activites at their center of each company.

"Financial and Accounting" sector

Accounting - subsector
Lehman
Merrill-Lynch

Banks - subsector
ICBC (China)
J.P. Morgan Chase (this company also has a "retail unit")
Royal Bank of Scotland
Santandar (Spain)
Fortis (Belgo-Dutch bank)

Private Equity - subsector
ABM Abro (Dutch, just merged with Barclays UK)
Blackstone UK
Kohlberg Kravits Roberts
New Century Financial

Stockbrokers - subsector
Goldmann Sachs

That's what I've got for this sector at present. There are several problems with it; the problem that most bothers me at present is my attempt to split into two cats the subsector of banks from that of I've labelled "private equity" companies--which are in good part specialist banks engaged in many large-scale activities that don't feature private banking of individuals (or at least only the "filty rich" whose accounts are enormous in dollars or other currency/ies compared to most middleclass to lowerclass bank acccount holders. Another feature of the commercial banks is that they are lenders to huge corporations, sometimes to governments and govt agencies working on large-scale projects. And the crowning feature that I'm trying to get a bead on, they are often what are called "holding companies."

Another problem is the separation I've made between "central banks" which often are not banks, but govt agencies that play a role in the control of the economy and the furtherance of govt policy (like Keynesian techniques) in regard to a national economy. Also, are specialized govt financial agencies such as the US's Securities Exchange Commision. And then there's the stockmarkets where the mentioned stockbrokerage firms are active. But, stockmarkets are themselves usually businesses that are owned, have a board of directors, and make a profit (or loss) annually.

So, many revisions are possible in regard to this initial example. More to come.

Dhowing industriously thru the Dow Industrial Average for industrial-sector shares marketed on the Stock Market (NYSE)

Dow at record close and up for third strait week, nears 13,000 (Apr20,2k7).
-----------
Dow at record on Asian rebound, earnings by Nick Godt (Apr20,2k7)

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- U.S. stocks rallied Friday, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average to another record high and the market on track for strong weekly gains, following a rebound rally in Asian markets overnight and better-than-expected earnings from the likes of Caterpillar Inc. and Google Inc. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU :
Dow Jones Industrial Average) Last: 12,961.98+153.35+1.20% > 4:30pm 04/20/2007.

$INDU12,961.98, +153.35, +1.2% ) rallied 155 points to 12,964, a new record close, at the unofficial 4 p.m. close. For the week, the Dow surged 2.8%, marking its third straight week of gains. Caterpillar (CAT :

CAT71.82, +3.20, +4.7% ) surged 4.7% after its earnings topped expectations and the heavy-equipment maker raised its guidance. The S&P 500 index ($SPX :
S&P 500 Index

$SPX1,484.35, +13.62, +0.9% ) rose 13 points to 1,484, and advanced 2.2% on the week. The Nasdaq Composite (COMP :
Nasdaq Composite Index

COMP2,526.39, +21.04, +0.8% ) gained 21 points to 2,526 on Friday, and rose 1.4% on the week.

Google (GOOG :
google inc cl a
News , chart , profile , more
Last: 482.48+10.83+2.30%
4:00pm 04/20/2007

GOOG482.48, +10.83, +2.3% ) helped power the tech sector Friday, gaining 2.3% after its earnings powered past expectations. End of Story

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Dow Industrials surge by triple digits to top 12,900 for first time (Apr20,2k7)
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Dow industrials close with gain of less than 5 points but notch record h+ (Apr19,2k7).
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Dow industrials rise 29 points to all time h+ (Apr18,2k7).
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Dow hits all-time intra-day h+ of 12,798 (Apr18,2k7).
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Dow closes over 100 points h+er, above level seen before Feb. 27 plunge (Apr16,2k7).
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Dow industrials rise for 8th strait session (Apr10,2k7).
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Dow industrials close at h+est levels in 5 weeks, index up for strait days (Apr3,2k7).
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Dow industrials post first quarterly loss since Q2 2005 (Mar30,2k7).
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Dow industrials advance in all 5 sessions to gain 3,1% on week (Mar23,2k7).
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Up as much as 191 points on Fed news, Dow industrials move into black for 2007 (Mar21,2k7)
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Dow industrials erase 135-point intraday decline, close with 57-point gain (Mar14,2k7).
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Dow industrials fall more than 80 points, index below 12,000 for first time in four months (Mar13,2k7).
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Dow industrials fall more than 240 points; Dow, Nasdaq, S&P each lose 2% (Mar13,2k7).
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Dow industrials drop 200 points (Mar13,2k7).
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Dow ends day with 155-point gain, the biggest since July 2006 (Mar6,2k7).
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Dow industrials fall 4.3% in worst weekly decline in 4 years (Mar2,2k7).
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Dow industrials drop more than 100 points (Mar2,2k7).
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Dow industrials close 0.3 lower, recovering from early sell-off (Mar1,2k7).
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Dow industrials fall 200 points early Thursday, with all 40 components in red (Mar1,2k7).
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Stock indexes trim losses, after manufacturing gauge shows expansion (Mar1,2k7).
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Dow industrials up as much as 137 points as rebound adds momentum (Feb28,2k7).
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Dow industrials up 0.6% as US stock indexes seek to bounce back from sell-off (Feb28,2k7).
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Dow industrials plunge by 475 points (Feb27,2k7).
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Dow industrial average drops by 200 points to 12,432 points (Feb27.2k7).
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Business Ideologies--Libertarianism as an ideology of "Radicals for Capitalism"

On Volokh Conspiracy, contributor David Bernstein briefly reviews, with several live-links, a new book.

Radicals for Capitalism:

I'm very much looking forward to reading Brian Doherty's book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern Libertarian Movement. The New York Sun reviews it here, and the New York Post, here. The Sun review is by Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic, one of of my favorite magazines. I didn't know Shermer was a libertarian, though I knew he was a former Objectivist.

I've known Brian since we attended an IHS seminar together in 1988. What, no comp review copy, Brian? Glenn Reynolds got one! Trivia note: Also attending that seminar was future Weekend Today Show anchor and Katie Couric sub Jodi Applegate, whom all the guys developed a crush on.

UPDATE: And the second most famous person attending that seminar was future Federal Election Commission Chairman Brad Smith.

Business Categories -- building on Chris Knight's list for EzineArticles

In my pursuit of a viable working set of categories for organizing thawts about economics and business, I recalled a list sent out to email newsletter subscribers (like myself) by Chris Knight of Ezine Articles. Here's his list for your meditation, and for clicking-up to reference his file of articles on offer for publication on websites.

Business

Accounting
Accounting Payroll
Advertising
Branding
Careers Employment
Change Management
Customer Service
Entrepreneurialism
Ethics
Franchising
Fundraising
Industrial Mechanical
Management
Marketing
Marketing Direct
Negotiation
Networking
Outsourcing
PR
Presentation
Productivity
Resumes Cover Letters
Sales
Sales Management
Sales Teleselling
Sales Training
Small Business
Solo Professionals
Strategic Planning
Team Building
Top7 or 10 Tips
Venture Capital
Workplace Communication

Now, I would organize many of these into a hierarchical system of at least three tiers, adding some of my own and reducing some to mere "detail mentioned" status--thus, not really a category for my purposes.

I must mention further that Mr Knight has spun-off elements of a hypothetical earlier list and made the spin-offs separate from his "Business" categories as such--his further basic cats of some relevance here, being "Internet and Businesses Online," "Finance," "Insurance," "Legal," "Real Estate," "Home Based Business."

Chris Knight, of course, has very functional reasons for his entire set, including the spin-offs. Functionally, the mere quantifcation of articles received by writers using his online writers' services, influences the need for organizing basic categories according to the number of specific kinds of articles on hand. But, since I'm more interested in a systemic categoriztion that can support some theorization, my set ulitmately will be different. Chris also says the number and organization of his categories can change over time, for his purposes. And that's just good business from the standpoint of the services to online writers that he offers.

Regarding the differences between the two purposes, for instance, Mr Knight's category of "Legal" would probably not be overwhelmingly concerned with the business of law, lawyers, law firms, courts, prosecutors of criminal cases, police, associations of police officers, govt departments of justice in various jurisdicatoins, etc. They all have bugets (business); but their over-riding purpose is juridical. Thus, my list could include such economic/business aspects of "Legal" under "Business," but I would be concerned to cross-refernece the business aspects with the law aspects as such. I would definitely have a category, not of "Legal," but of "Juridics."

Additionally, I would want to make sure that my system had techniques to take into account the internal juridics of any and every business. As well as the external juridics--where one business, for instance, enters into contractual relationship with another. The distinction between the internal and external jurdic relationships of (say) a business, is made conclusively by the law philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (Encyclopedia of the Science of Law). Likewise, HD's analysis allows us to observe the internal and external economic/business relations of law instituions and law firms, that are first of all not businesses but juridically-qualified entities. But this is getting far ahead of ourselves.

Thus, it's better to start somewhere close to the ground, and that's where Knight's organization of the material of his list helps us to start, slanted tho it be to the immediate purposes he has at hand. He starts with the phenomena--in this case as they compile in the concerns of a number of ezine-article writers who engage Chris Knight's services.

Looking for a list of business categories for Chris Knight's ezine-writers service

On first try, I didn't find what I was looking for when I entered "business categories" as a complete phrase into the Chris Knight service's search facility. The best I got was a threaded list called epub which seems to be part of the Knight operation. The list's subject is "Useful online resource list," and here's one contributor's intro to a long list of seemingly useful websites, Helen Rickman's Small Business Online Resource Round-Up:

Hi, I'm Cheryl Rickman and I've just joined this list and wanted to provide you all with something really useful, so i've posted below my online resources (promotion/marketing/small business links) column for Better Business magazine.

Worth checking out if you're oriented to small business. But I'm looking for Knight's list of over 100 business categories, hoppers into which business writer's connected to the Knight services place their contributions for syndication, etc.

Mr Knight also publishes an email newsletter on his ezine services. I think it's called Ezine@Articles, something like that. So I'd best put away my browser and call up my email files to see if I still have edition with the info I want.

Manufacturing a meme to challenge traffic-driving and a hope for an alternative kind of business, perhaps?

The tech-oriented blog for internetters, Quick Online Tips pushes a kind of antibiz biz, replete with links that don't relate to any of those that loop-link to your blog or website. I never thawt in terms of some absolute reciprocity of links, or subscribed to the idea of "driving traffic to your site" (or my blogs). Tho I do want readers, of course. But in this blog-entry, based on Mack Collier's ideas at Viral Garden, "The Revenge of the Z-Lister" (Dec12,2k6) we meet a manufactured wannabe meme, anxious to be lodged securely in someone's memory.

QOT/s uptake is entitled "The Z-List Blog Meme Challenges Technorati A-List" (Feb9,2k7), in which something else is going on. I'm just not sure about its motive and intent. Just a prefabricated meme gone wild, and much amuck?

What I found interesting was the live-link list supplied with Quick Online Tips' blog-entry; QOT seems to offer many of these links as alternative to some crass capitalist way of internetting. Is there a notion of "alternative business" operating here? Or just altruistic "link-love" as one of these sources suggests? Or what?

Dosh Dosh: Turns out this is a T-shirt supplier; you design and pay; they ship, apparently. Caveat emptor--buyer beware!

Daily Blog Tips: This one seems to do what it promises. Apr6,2k7 blog-entries include one on "How Popular is Your Site?" with a resonable check-list. Another is on punctuation with some worthwhile thawts.


Forged Euphoria: "This is basically my personal space where I will post just about whatever I feel like posting. News, Code, Rants and just about anything else I can cram in." I like the monthly
calendar; but it's on a black background, so it won't work for me ...unless.

Above Popular: This blog is about doing what's right istead of what's popular. It also discusses Africa and Mozambique and their stuggles for stability. This one confused and may not work; the original link took me to a community page of the social network My BlogLog, which supplied an easy link thru its portal to the page linked here. I hope it works.

Deepak: This is a specifically Deepak Chopra site. You know, the "meditation and alternative medicine" Guru who's learned how to make mega-bucks on easy New Agey so-called meditation and Ayuravedic medicine from ancient India. So far, the trend of these links seems quite New Age.

Gangster Sonny: "I start this blog because I’m big fan of oldtime gangsters and Italian mafia and I want to find some people who likes this too. The best movie about mafia is Godfather also I like Gotti, Casino, Godfellas, Scarface (1932) and Scarface (with Al Pacino). If you’re a big fan of mafia, gangsters, please contact me."
Sorry, Sonny, I ain't no fan of gangsters; but I do think The Godfather trilogy is a great movie series. And the link to you is a relief to the softbrain stuff of New Age origin. By this is the second MyBlogLog portal and social network.

Connected Internet: Styles itself as "The latest tech, mobile, and gaming news." A relief from the New Age trend and the MyBlogLog social network.


Blog-Op: "Posted in Paid Posts | 4 Comments » Posted by: Chris Lodge. « Previous Entries. Blog-Op is powered by WordPress and the Fluid Web Theme ..." This one's a pusher of the vaunted Z-List so it's in the loop-link classification, and its part of the MyBlogLog setup.

Mike’s Money Making Mission: "Follow Mike's Mission To Make Money Using Free Blogs" -- uses "link love" lingo. The whole thing's beginning to sound like a pyramid scheme to me. but maybe not. I'm bored at this point, so I'll stop digging up URL code the remaining links until some time when my curiosity about the Z-List may return, or not.

Time to Budget. "To gain financial freedom you must take control of your money, plan for the future and Stop Borrowing Money! This blog is about one family's journey toward financial freedom. --Blog Author: Mona Weather


Can I Make Big Money Online. "This blog reveals what I and others are doing to make money online." Affiliate Marketing seems to be the prevailing gimmick here. The writing is at the h+ school sophomore level, at its worst. Idiotic simplistic sentences, let alone the content.

Blogtrepreneur. "Welcome to Blogtrepreneur.com. I’m Adnan, a young and hopeful entrepreneur from the UK. I hope you enjoy reading my posts about entrepreneurship, business and the internet as much as I enjoy writing them!"

Flee the Cube--From Employee to Employer. Better than most on this list, but still entirely too schmaltzy for my taste.

Blogging Secret. "Blogging,Reviews,Gadgets,Tips and Make Money Online." Looks like a WordPress header, seems to be a MyBlogLog doozy. Text shows low-level literacy in English: "Yes, dear my fellow readers and friends, I'm back, this is my life log. I have pass some difficult time last week until today. What happen? Haha, unbelievable, my honey, or girl friend just break with me. The reason? She change her mind in just a second. Yes, the fact is cruel, but she not love me anymore, now with other guy that from her workplace. I allow her to work last 3 months ..."

Blogging to Fame Takes you to MyBlogLog--a special breed of social networking. "BLOGGING TO FAME! Discussions to make blogs popular by just not search engine optimization but making it more accessible, consumable, valuable to visitors. Blogging to Fame, once you're past the MyBlogLog portal. 1,403 Community Members."


Million Dollar Experiment heads Down Under. New Zealand connection to MyBlogLog. "The idea is to let a million dollars manifest itself to you, by simply declaring it andd thinking about it. Letting the universe provide it for you basically!" Sounds like New Agey-style pyramid scam to me. The most recent blog-entry headline: "The Blog Traffic Challenge--Let's Rumble!!!"

Quest to make money on the internet

Kumiko’s Cash Quest

Calico Monkey

Internet Bazaar

Shotgun Marketing Blog

BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes!
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
Two Hat Marketing
darrenbarefoot.com
The Emerging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
NewsPaperGrl
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly
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A-list bloggers have always been a matter of envy and parodies. A quick look at a 100K feedburner feed counter on a top blog can make your 1K feel insignificant. Remember the John Scott $10000 Challenge for linking to Non Technorati Top 100 blogs. If you still believe in Technorati counts, find which type of blogebrity you are…

Of course, I don't have time to copy the URLs of all the above links, and embed them in my HTML code for the page, as I guess I'm supposed to do. But try clicking up the sources and try a couple of these links--oops! I'm "driving traffic" to the source-blogs. Mea culpa!