Alphablogs

Hello everyone! Here we go – our Canada 9-5 blog carnival is officially in year two. Well, in calendar year two – but who’s counting!

Canada 9-5 is something we’re very excited about. What we have on offer here is once again the crème de la crème of Canadian business bloggers, people who use the power of blogging to showcase their professional and business expertise and to better get to know their customers and clients. We’re concentrating on non-IT bloggers; for IT people, blogging is second nature – it’s people whose business isn’t in IT already who, we think, need some help seeing the magic of blogging.

We even have a badge for it now (yup, we’re working on our blogging goals). I’ll let Carol have the word here for a sec, explain why we thought it would be important to do this:

We are really keen to see Canada 9-5 get going strong this year, and we’ve been calling 2008: The Year of the Business Blog.

Here’s our badge – feel free to use it to link back to us.

So here is our line-up for this month:

Small Business Owners – How tough to you want to get?
Our first article is by someone we already met – welcome back, Vahid! To Succeed As a Business Owner, You Have to Be Tough is a post on his blog, Work at Home Business Solutions. It talks about the drawbacks of being tough – burnout, for example – and how to deal with it.

Divorce Help – All the way from the East Coast to BC
Divorce Online is a good resource for people all over Canada who have decided they need to part ways with their spouses but want to go for an uncontested divorce. What I like about this blog is that it looks at both Federal and the various Provincial laws. Lately, they’ve had a few posts on spousal support – this one, for example.

Coaching - The poetry of search engine statistics
Lee Down is a coach here in Vancouver. His background is actually quite similar to mine – a quirky mix of IT, spirituality, community development, writing and human services. This post here about the deeper usefulness of search engine statistics shows his personality in a wonderful way. That’s exactly what blogs do – they help your clients get to know you better.

Fashion - Stories from a “petite activist”
Cynthia C is a writer and petite activist from Toronto. She has recently published her first book, Aspirations, which can be found online (Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, Borders, etc) and in bookstores everywhere. I have to confess, I’ve never heard of petite activists before – but it makes perfect sense! I have two friends who are very short and always complain of how difficult it is to find pants (and reach cupboards and find your friends in a mass of people when everyone is at least a foot taller and and and …)

Really enjoyed this article – I always find little historical bits like this one here fascinating:

The inventor of petite sizes, Hannah Troy, died almost 15 years ago at the age of 93. Mrs. Troy thought up the petite size when she noticed that many women were pulling on shoulders and waists, making them fit their figures properly. And yes, like many of us petites who know from experience, Mrs. Troy knew that alterations can “spoil the design.”

Community banking - What’s a blog bar?
Gene Blishen runs a small credit union; his blog is a bit about that and a bit about all kinds of things. He’s a great example of what we talked about in an earlier article, Blogging for business – letting your hair down. In the article we’re showcasing, Gene talks about the idea of consumers letting their hair down: In blog bars, customers (or clients, or consumers, whatever you want to call them) can let you know online right away what they think. These “blog bars” are installed on location. A very interesting idea – we’re coming full-circle: from online to on-site.

This concludes this edition of Canada 9-5. The next edition will come out on February 28. Got any articles to submit? If it’s a Canadian blog that talks about work or business, bring it on – here’s the submission form.