When I began freelancing I thought it was important to make my fledgling business appear bigger and more established than it really was. My website used phrases like “our designers” and “our programmers” in an effort to make a one-man show look like a full team of professionals. No matter what a potential client wanted I felt the need to make them believe I had all of the resources to do it.

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I just read an interesting article on the Advertising Age website. The author, Phil Johnson, talks about the trend toward agencies wanting to incorporate more interactive capabilities and provides some insights from his own efforts.

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My company recently began releasing updates to our content management system on an almost-weekly basis. Previously our approach was to determine which features should be included in the next release, compute a timeline appropriate for the requirements, and then get to work. Most of our timelines were at least a month long, while some approached 2 or 3 months.

Our new approach, inspired in part by the open source community’s “release early, release often” mantra, involves setting a regular release schedule (weekly in our case) and then prioritizing the features into these weekly buckets. Our goal is to deliver “business value” each week in some way. If a desired feature can’t be built in one week, we find a way to break it into smaller portions that can each be done within one week.

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There is a portion of this world’s population that could care less about the World Wide Web. Even if they’re aware of it’s existence, it still has no direct bearing on their day-to-day lives. An Internet outage doesn’t affect their work. If Twitter/YouTube/Insert-your-favorite-app-here goes down for an hour they feel no anxiety and have zero frustration.

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Wow. This is big news. Microsoft just bid $44.6 billion dollars (half cash, half stock) for the beleaguered Yahoo!

If this deal goes through, this puts the new combined company, let’s call it Microhoo!, in a much stronger 2nd place to Google in terms of online search.

Hope you own some Yahoo! stock today. It’s up 44% at the moment.