Nothing like A Podcast Carol to change one's outlook on podcasting for 2007.

How are you keeping in touch with your clients before the new year? What does your vacation look like?

Happy Holidays!

The government pays a lot of lip service risk-taking, entrepreneurship and small business. In fact, many believe that it can be advantageous for tax purposes to be an entrepreneur (write-offs, SBA loans, hiring family members, etc.). In a fascinating blog post titled Should We Worry about the Rising Inequality in Income and Wealth?, Judge Richard Posner considers how a high marginal taxes effects entrepreneurs and other risk takers:

What are the causes, and what are the effects, of this trend in the income (and of course wealth) of the highest-earning segment of the distribution? Part of it is reduced marginal tax rates, because high marginal tax rates discourage risk-taking. Consider two individuals: one is a salaried worker with an annual income of $100,000 and good job security, and the other is an entrepreneur with a 10 percent chance of earning $1 million in a given year and a 90 percent chance of earning nothing that year. Their average annual incomes are the same, but a highly progressive tax will make the entrepreneur's expected after-tax income much lower than the salaried worker's.

Setting off a barrage of cutesy opening lines by bloggers, Time Magazine designated "You" as the person of the year. Bloggers responded with begrudging thanks, collective self-congratulations, lessons in semantics and more musings. Triumph! Citizen media has finally overtaken professional journalism in influence. However, what does it say that a silly magazine award (published by the "M.S.M." no less) can still set the blogosphere a flutter?

People have always placed too much authority in the "Man of the Year", I mean "Person of the Year", oh, "People of the Year" award. But the editors at Time did their job well: They cause controversy and got attention. After all, they're pros.

If this shift was really the most significant thing to happen in 2006, why not give the award to one of the entrepreneurs behind it? After all, all of the big players in this shift were startups, not new ventures by existing big companies. When a politician has a lot of influence, "you the voter" who put him or her in office doesn't get the award. Let's remember that entrepreneurs change the world, and that they made their mark on 2006.

Several months ago, I confessed to being a Scan Artist. I bought a fantastic, speedy desktop scanner from Fujitsu and converted almost every paper record in my home office into a PDF file. I don't keep hard copies of anything anymore. There are many virtues to a paper-free life. For those of us living in small Manhattan apartments, the space saved by eliminating paper files was enough, by

With so much change going on in media, it's hard to tell who's your friend or your enemy. Having a good strategy for dealing with others who could either be a great partner or a fierce competitor is crucial for many startups, as we saw with PayPal and Zingy. A few weeks ago at an event put on by The Week, I heard WPP chairman and CEO Sir Martin Sorrell use the perfect term to describe such a relation (in this case referring to Google): frenemy.

If Sun-tzu was right that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer, then what should you do with frenemies? Smart entrepreneurs should at least start recognizing who their frenemies are. To give them a push, I just created an entry in Wikipedia for Frenemy.

It's my first Wikipedia entry, so please help clean it up and add your thoughts. Here it is as I originally wrote it:

We've covered the ongoing debate over "teaching" entrepreneurship. Now we have a report from the front lines.

Ravi Mishra, a University of Pennsylvania junior double majoring in engineering and business who still describes his location as "Silicon Valley, California", writes a blog post titled Where Entrepreneurship Comes to Die.

He tears apart his fellow b-schoolers' business ideas with an entertaining vengeance usually only seen in a venture capitalist (I wonder what he scored on the VCAT), which includes building the craigslist for college students (as if craigslist isn't the craigslist for college students) and a plan to bring the campus meal plan off campus.

Yet Ravi doesn't lay all the blame on his Ivy compatriots. He says of the class: