There’s been a couple of juicy blog posts in Memeorandum this week about business startups. One looks at the prospects for ditching all venture capitalists and getting your new business absolutely free ~ at least for a year. The other gives ten shrewd tips on getting started.

Let’s take the freebie first ~ I’m guessing you’ll be more interested in that.

Rick Segal, who appears to be a VC himself based in Toronto, takes us step by step through the process of picking up free tools and services to get the show on the road. Some of it involves long-term free credit, and other steps come close to ripping off other businesses’ bandwidth, but let’s go with the flow on this.

The most interesting part is how you can get lots of programming, prototyping, testing effort free from a number of universities eager to give their postgrads some experience beyond the ivory tower. “… the University of Waterloo [Canada] has an entire program dedicated to taking ideas and running them through the whole process of plans, code, prototypes, etc.” And it’s all free.

How about a free domain name, and I mean a real one, not a subdomain : “Head on over to http://www.registerfly.com/ and sign up for a .be domain. It’s Belgium, beats me, but the Registerfly guys are doing them, free, for the first year.”

Hmmm, herculepoirot.be sounds good to me.

He even gives us a good Scoble joke : “And before all you Robert Scoble haters/lovers jump on this, fuhgettaboutit, I already reserved scoblewanna.be. It’s a holiday gift for mini-microsoft. But, I digress.” Ha ha ha.

Rick then makes a final pitch for ditching his profession : “Staff, infrastructure, tools, equipment and a domain name are all a pretty good start for zero capital.”

What he doesn’t mention is after all that chasing around you might need a new pair of shoes. Free shoes, anyone?

Now the second dainty dish for the startup upstart. This comes from Evan Williams, whose company, Pyra, created Blogger.com, the first real blogging tool for the masses. After selling Blogger to Google, he now has a podcasting startup called Odeo.

His post “Ten Rules for Web Startups” is on his Blogger blog, Evhead. I’ll just give the headline of each tip to save space. Anyone interested should read the original post.

1. Be Narrow
2. Be Different
3. Be Casual
4. Be Picky
5. Be User-Centric
6. Be Self-Centered
7. Be Greedy
8. Be Tiny
9. Be Agile
10. Be Balanced
11. (Bonus) Be Wary

I would add : 12. (Bonus) Always Give More Than You Promise.

You get the drift. Good advice if you’re thinking of starting that “free” business beloved of Canadian venture capitalists. But remember one thing :

13. (Double Bonus) There’s no such thing as a free donut.

That excellent Business Week journalist, Stephen Baker, has a thought-provoking post over at Blogspotting. Its title is a telling “Knowledge workers: We’re on our own“, and it means what it says.

Face it, knowledge workers, if we’re not already freelancing, we’re heading in that direction. I’m typing this on a company-owned laptop, but Gartner predicts that within three years, one in 10 companies will be forcing employees to provide their own laptops. I’m surprised the number isn’t higher.

Well, as a full-time journalist, blogger and author I suppose “knowledge worker” is as good a description as any ~ better than “sex worker” anyway.

Stephen paints a grim picture : “Increasingly, we’ll be on our own.” Grim for some, at least. Personally, I’ve always been “on my own”. All authors are. But I can see it would be tough for the gregarious types who are addicted to office politics and the water-cooler mafia.

“Why is this happening? Companies have the data and the intelligence now to cut the jobs they need done into tiny slices, each one going to the person best equipped to handle it anywhere on the globe. It’s a virtual assembly line.”

This is my long-held theory that each critical decision should be taken at the point of maximum competence. I call it “superdemocracy”. I once sent the idea to Michael Howard, leader of the UK Conservative Party, but didn’t get a reply. It’s time had not yet come.

Now comes the juicy part of Stephen’s post. For those who blog more in hope than expectation, this is a Business Week endorsement of our little secret activity :

So what do we do? For starters, we blog. That way we build our individual brands, our knowledge, and our network of connections. These are going to be ever more vital assets in the years ahead. If we do a good enough job building them, companies may decide to bid for our services fulltime, even throwing in insurance and a 401K.

Soon, in the “ecosystem that’s unfolding, one teeming with knowledge entrepreneurs, I’m betting that most of us, by choice or circumstance, are going to be running our own show.”

This is happening now. Many of my friends are peeling away from the corporate system, and those who are not, would like to. Interestingly, as Stephen says, blogging is the centrepiece of that effort. It puts you out there and up there, in the neon lights of a business Broadway that’s tapping its way into the 21st century as the hoofers of old tap-danced into the 20th.

Writing in The Times (London) today, former editor William Rees-Mogg claims that Google is endangering his academic publishing company by its rapacious tactic of scanning any books it pleases and publishing them online.

Google has an agreement with a handful of major libraries to scan their whole collections. Among them are Harvard and Stanford, plus two British copyright libraries, the British Library and the Bodleian at Oxford, which receive copies of all UK-published books free by law.

Rees-Mogg’s ancient publishing imprint, Pickering & Chatto, subsidizes the five copyright libraries “by about £45,000 [$75,000] a year in free books, a significant cost for a small publisher.”

He makes the crucial point that, “the British Library does not acquire the copyright as well as the free books.”

Obviously Google has every right to republish books that are out of copyright. The question concerns books that are still in copyright and will remain so for 70 years or more. If Google can scan these books, without the permission of the publisher, and include them in its database, then most libraries will not need to buy them. And if librarians do not buy them, they cannot be published. The whole world of learning will be damaged, and academic publishing will cease to be a viable business.

A questionmark also arises over the archival longevity of electronic information. Pickering & Chatto targets its titles at the archival market. “They are stitched, on acid-free paper, with durable cloth bindings. They will last for centuries. Electronic systems of storage have no such archival reliability.”

Rees-Mogg accepts the need for ebooks : “There is no problem about producing electronic books for those who prefer them; indeed, some of our books are published in electronic form. The problem is essentially one of copyright and its attendant revenue consequences. Can Google scan and extract books that are still in copyright without payment to the copyright owner?”

And there lies the crux of the matter. Google is an electronic publisher and obsessive collector of the world’s knowledge. By creating an engine that can search and deliver that content with accuracy, it has won a deserved reputation as a benefactor of mankind. That it makes a great deal of money by hanging its advertising contextually around the edges of that information, and even pays publishers for doing so, is widely seen as fair dealing.

Of course, online copyright issues are by no means settled, and Google has taken the robust attitude that it will continue on its course until these matters are cleared up and tested in court. The break in Google’s logic is that with print books it’s dealing in a field of settled copyright law. Muscling in and scanning the work of others into its online publishing format is a gigantic act of piracy against authors and publishers.

William Rees-Mogg comments : “Academic publishing is an essential part of the chain of higher education. Together with a relatively small number of similar publishers of edited texts and scholarly monographs, of which outside the sciences the major university presses are the largest, we provide the opportunity for advances in scholarship to be published. This is not a bookshop market. It is largely a postgraduate library market, which means it is quite small.”

He finishes his piece : “I am an interested party, at the interface between university authors and university libraries. So far as I am concerned, Google must accept the rights in intellectual property. The survival of the book depends on that.”

Google should understand that when it steps outside the bounds of its specialist field, it must play by the rules, or it endangers its hard-won reputation as one of the good guys.

Jeremy Wright’s new book Blog Marketing is selling like hot chilli peppers over at Amazon.com, so here’s a short cut if you want to give it to your beloved for Christmas. Just email the author at : jeremyATensightDOTorg where he seems to have a secret cache hidden away.

Just to remind you : Jeremy is President of b5media, and became famous for auctioning his blog talents on eBay. A Canadian, he’s also slightly notorious for being held at the U.S. border when he declared himself a “blogger”.

SYNTAGMA has not had a chance to review this volume yet, though we have seen a chapter or two.

Definitely recommended.

Update: Jeremy informs us that Amazon now has a good stock of Blog Marketing.