How does one person stack up against another? Just ask Google. Go to GoogleFight.com, enter any two people (or other search terms) and see who kicks the other out of the ring.

Sample Google fights include “my girlfriend” vs. Pamela Anderson (girlfriend 5:4), “luke skywalker” vs. “darth vader”, and oj simpson vs. homer simpson (Homer, going away).

It’s my birthday today. (37, thanks for asking.) Interestingly, Rotary is 100 years old today. It’s nice to have 1.2 million Rotarians, including my dad, helping to celebrate your birthday.

Wesley Atkins does. And thanks for the great review, Wesley!

Some people have been chatting offline with Mark Jen, the guy who got fired by Google for blogging. Gelf interviewed Mark here. And if you haven’t seen it yet, Mark’s blog is here.
It’s interesting to see the snapshot of his traffic stats. A couple hits a day to 100,000. Go slashdot.

Also, one blogger had dinner with Mark and offers a good list of advice points for those who want to blog at work.

My advice? Quit your job and start your own business on the internet.

If you don’t know what to sell or how to do it, buy Andy’s book for $49. I did, and 1 year later we have 8 employees. And yes, it’s ok if they blog at work.
By the way, this is the weekend that Andy and I are teaching the weekend seminar in Miami on “Selling Physical Products Online.” Andy is already in Miami, sleeping, after we were working day and night all week to make the Stomper Extreme Videos (coming soon!).

I’m leaving for Miami in an hour. Ken McCarthy is hosting the seminar, and if you have any interest in selling actual physical products online, you may want to get the videos. After I see them, I’ll let you know how they turn out. Andy was a professional video editor before becoming the King of Yahoo Stores, so I’m optimistic that they will be great. (#2 on Google for “Yahoo Store” just behind Yahoo.)

Back to bloggers and businesses…

In the old days, business schools called it open book management. The idea was that if the employees knew more about what was going on with the company, including costs, profits and lossses, they’d care more, feel more involved, and make better decisions.

I agree with that.

Our employees know how much we sell every day and everyone takes pride in reaching new marks for gross sales. Where we can, we show them the costs and margins. I think the more everyone on the team knows about and understands the whole business, the better it is for the bottom line.

But “business blogging” goes beyond “open book management.” For example, I also show the world our numbers in many cases. Public companies, of course, have to do it. We don’t.

I do it mostly to initiate conversations with the people I feel the strongest affinity for: those people trying to start or grow their own business. People on my email list tend to be people who are either trying to start or trying to expand their own internet-based business. Or the internet marketing component of their brick and mortar business.

Some of the people on my list already own hugely successful companies. Others are struggling to figure out how to launch their first store.

I hope, for example, that by publishing the sales statistics of our online store, that I can create conversations with other like minded people who want to create their own online businesses and never have to worry about being fired for anything, much less blogging. If our story inspires a few people to finally get their own business going, that’s as good as it gets.

Long after “Open Book Management” became a regular business school topic, three guys wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto. If you haven’t read the book in awhile, you should read it again.

Blogs are (or should be) a core day-to-day component of companies trying to have better conversations with their customers. Personal blogs can be interesting, of course.

But business blogs are fascinating. Few companies are doing it “right.” Many are doing it “wrong.” And there is everything in between.

Watch how different businesses jump into the blogosphere in the coming years. It’s not an easy thing for a big company to do.

But I think there will be a lot of interest in “business blogging” in the next couple years.

In fact, I am teaming up with Dave Taylor, one of the biggest experts on “business blogging” to create an entire business blogging curriculum. We plan to offer an eight part curriculum, by webinar, to teach any company, business owner, marketing/communications department how to implement an effective business blog.

From the basics of setting up Movable Type to the most advanced features, to the best cutting-edge strategies for implementing a “business” blog that actually adds value, we’re going to cover it all in an eight-part course.

More information on this later, but if you’re inerested, send an email to businessblogs@bradfallon.com. This isn’t going to be a “basic” course, but will be a PhD level course in business blogging. No prior experience with blogs is required, just a desire to take your business to the next level and create (much) higher better conversations with your customers.

I didn’t want to comment until now. (Dave Taylor offers a good rule: “If you don’t know, don’t spread rumors, even in the blogosphere.”)

But apparently, it’s true. Google fired an employee, Mark Jen, for blogging. You can read the story on Zawodny’s blog. And Battelle’s take here.

Is this the right move for a company with the motto “Do no evil”?

Well Jennifer’s sure getting a lot of press lately. Now her picture is in the current (February) issue of Entrepreneur magazine. Her picture is on page 59, but you can read the article online here.

I took the picture myself, but no photo credit for me. This picture shows Jen holding up some of her wholesale wedding favors in our living room. The photo in the adirondack beach chair photo frame is our engagement photo. So I guess I can say I get my picture in there too!

Entrepreneur, February 2005, page 59

Paulette Thomas wrote a case study about our Yahoo Store, My Wedding Favors and our wholesale company, Kate Aspen, in her Wall Street Journal column Tuesday. It was in the Marketplace section on page two, but you can read it online here.

The China Trip is officially a go. The first week in March, we’re taking ten people with us who want to import their own products directly from the factories in China to sell on eBay or their own web sites. If you’re interested the information is here: Go to China. You can see some examples of products and pricing there too.

Should be a fun trip! (And very profitable for those who like to sell physical products online.)

Well the MSN Search Engine is officially launched. New look to msn.com, less clutter, more focus on the search, and a special message from Bill.

Interestingly, the search results still display at beta.search.msn.com.

A couple of things are worth noting. First, according to Dow Jones newswire, just last week Bill Gates said they were “stupid as hell.” Don’t expect that to last.

According to the same Seattle Times article, (hat tip: Stomper Pete from Atlanta), Microsoft is going to have 90% of American knowing about MSN in the next few months. Wow, that’s a lot of ads.

Miscrosoft isn’t saying how much they’re going to spend to make almost everyone aware of their new search engine, but they say it’s in the ballpark of their other aggressive national advertising campaigns. That means hundreds of millions of dollars. I wonder if it’s going to be more with their chubby guy in the butterfly suit…

Bottom line: you may want to start paying more attention to your rankings in MSN.