14 January 2011

On the Moneyed Midways - The Best Posts of 2010

Carnival Midway from The Jerk Welcome to this special Friday, January 14, 2011 edition of On the Moneyed Midways, where we're celebrating the end of 2010 by featuring the best posts we found in the best of the past year's money and business-related blog carnivals!

Normally, we use the word "special" as a euphemism for the word "late", however this edition of On the Moneyed Midways is genuinely special. After five years of weekly editions, this is the last regular edition of OMM.

The reason why is that the world of money and business-related blog carnivals has changed. When we first launched OMM, it was the heyday of what might be called "Social Media 1.0," where communities of bloggers would self-organize to highlight each others' best stuff. Blog carnivals were a big deal - they were the gathering places for the growing blogging community.

Flash forward to today and we find that both search engines and Social Media 2.0 ventures like Facebook and Twitter have combined to largely replace the role of blog carnivals. To a large extent, the Social Media 1.0 phenomenon of blog carnivals have become obsolete because it's easier to find blogs and because it's easier to meet up and share information with like-minded people in the new online communities.

That's not to say there aren't good blog carnivals still around (the Cavalcade of Risk, Carnival of Personal Finance and Festival of Frugality come immediately to mind). There are, however, many fewer blog carnivals to review each week than there were just a year ago (and many fewer than two years ago), and still even fewer ones worth reviewing on a regular basis as the quality of the remaining blog carnivals themselves has diminished.

So this special edition marks the end of the line for OMM. But that's not what makes this issue special.

What makes this issue of OMM genuinely special is that we're celebrating the best posts we found among all the business and money related blog carnivals of 2010. To do that, we went back through our entire archive for the year, which appears below this special edition, and re-reviewed all the posts we marked as being either Absolutely essential reading or as The Best Post of the Week, Anywhere!.

We then systematically narrowed down the list to separate the excellent from the merely well done, and then further to distill the exceptional from the outstanding.

The results of that exercise, the best posts we found in 2010 and the post we've awarded the title of being The Best Post of the Year, Anywhere! are below. Thank you for joining us for our final regular edition of OMM!

On the Moneyed Midways: The Best Posts of 2010
OMM Edition Carnival Post Blog Comments
January 15, 2010 Carnival of the Capitalists Are You Willing to Lose Your Best and Brightest Over a Bag of Pretzels? KnowHR Do you know how much your company spends on providing free sodas or snacks for employees? Do you appreciate how much the savings you might realize by stopping the employee freebies might actually cost your company through the higher turnover of talented staff who feel the company became a less pleasant place to work as a result?
April 2, 2010 Carnival of Money Stories I Went Homeless So You Don't Have To Soul Acrobats Alvin Tam wanted to confront his fears of becoming homeless by living like a vagrant for a day in Las Vegas. His experience was something else!
April 16, 2010 Carnival of Trust What Do You Sell? A Lesson in Personal Branding The Sales Blog S. Anthony Iannarino explores why Tiger Woods lost so many endorsement deals following a scandal in his personal life and why his "personal brand" risks sinking to the status of Lindsay Lohan's if he doesn't deliver off the golf course.
April 23, 2010 Festival of Frugality My Refrigerator Solar Cooker Penniless Parenting If you have an old fridge, aluminum foil, a clear plastic tablecloth, access to the sun and uncooked food, Penniless Parenting will tell you what you need to know to combine all these ingredients to make an energy-cost free dinner!
May 14, 2010 Money Hacks Carnival The Broke Person's Mantra Miss Bankrupt Christina identifies the thought behind the thinking that helps keep broke people, well, broke: "We think we need more, we think we deserve more, we spend money on things we didn't need before we had the money."
May 21, 2010 Cavalcade of Risk Anti-depressants and Fiscal Stimulus? Healthcare Economist Jason Shafrin compares government stimulus programs with what studies into anti-depressants are now revealing - they might originally have been intended for short term use, but over time, they become permanent fixtures, failing to cure the conditions for which they were prescribed.
May 28, 2010 Festival of Frugality The Wedding Gift as the Price of Admission Surviving and Thriving Donna Freedman reacts to J. Money's solution to the age-old dilemma of how much a wedding present should cost, while considering the potential fallout outcomes for the newlywed couple as she also argues against the rule of thumb that apparently says that the value of wedding gifts should be tied to the cost of the food provided for the guests at the reception.
June 25, 2010 Carnival of HR Establishing a Culture of Distributed Leadership Great Leadership Dan McCarthy explains just what it takes to have junior leaders ready to be able to take charge and get positive results without having to wait for their superiors in their organizations to act.
July 3, 2010 Carnival of Money Stories When Being Cheap Upfront Costs Big Bucks in the End Frugal Confessions Is parking on the street really a good idea compared to paying to park in a garage? That might depend on whether or not your car is likely to get towed away, as Amanda L. Grossman confesses.
August 6, 2010 Carnival of Personal Finance Your Big Fat Expensive Wedding: Stupid Is As Stupid Does Len Penzo dot Com Len Penzo offers future brides and grooms some of the best wedding planning advice available anywhere on the web by comparing the cost of Chelsea Clinton's wedding to his own.
August 20, 2010 Best of Money 5 Lessons from a Homeless Entrepreneur Christian PF Joe Plemon discusses what we can learn from the story of Travis Lloyd Kevie, who bought a six-pack, broke into a vacant bar, put up an "Open" sign and began serving customers, then kept his "business" going by using the money he made from that first six-pack to buy more. He had earned over $1,300 in cash and merchandise by the time he was arrested just four days later....
September 17, 2010 Carnival of Personal Finance Spending Under Pressure Richly Reasonable Have you ever been "mariachi-banded?" You'll understand what that means as Lauren considers those situations where you end up paying for crazy things you'd never buy under normal circumstances in The Best Post of the Year, Anywhere!
October 15, 2010 Carnival of Money Stories Squirreling Gone Wild #16: The Crafty Waitress Squirrelers The Squirrelers delve into the twisted mind games a waitress inflicted upon them to try to "nudge" them into giving her a large tip. Who knew that simply eating out posed such moral dilemmas?
November 19, 2010 Carnival of Money Stories Is Gambling a Good Motivation for Students? Faithful With a Few Khaleef Crumbley weighs the moral implications of a web site that entices students at certain universities to gamble on whether they'll earn the grades they target for their classes at the beginning of each semester.
November 19, 2010 Best of Money Don't Become a Slave to the Rat Race MoneyNing Vered Deleeuw considers who the best sales people are, argues that choosing to be unpopular is a path to real freedom and extracts an extraordinarily meaningful insight from a Jennifer Aniston movie of all things in a wide ranging post that really has to be read through twice to be fully appreciated!
December 10, 2010 Carnival of Money Stories How We Slashed Our Rent in Half (and Why We're Not Crazy) Daily Currency Adam Baker needed to find a new place for his family to live after being overseas for two years. They could afford to choose between renting a house in a good neighborhood for $900 per month, a house in a great neighborhood for $1250 per month or a one bedroom apartment in an okay neighborhood for $450 per month. The Bakers chose the apartment and no, they're not crazy!...

OMM's Full Index for 2010

Presented in reverse chronological order....

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