Let's BlogOff

Life’s full of hidden costs and one of the most common is the one alluded to in our headline. Restaurants in the United States externalize their labor costs and the prices listed on a menu actually cost at least 15% more than they appear. You can rail about this all you want, but at the end of the day the person who brings you your food needs to be compensated for it, and the responsibility for that compensation rests on the shoulders of the restaurant patrons.

Not knowing this and not living up to that obligation is a big no-no, just ask anyone who’s ever worked in a restaurant.

It’s not just restaurants of course, when you get a great price on a bicycle, a lot of times that great price hinges on your willingness to put it together. Great prices abound when you’re willing to bag your own groceries at Save A Lot or assemble your own sofa at Ikea.

This is not to say that externalized costs aren’t so much a “gotcha” as they are the true cost of a bargain.

Similarly, expenditures that don’t involve any externalized costs will require you to spend more money and allow you to save your time to do something else. Time equals money, whether its yours or someone else’s. Where people run into trouble is when they expect the cost of a full-service good or service to be the same as a no-service good or service. Clearly, hiring a contractor will cost more than a DIY project.

This topic is about hard costs, not emotional costs or costs of any other kind. Where do you fall on this line of hard costs –internalized versus externalized costs? If you’re a professional do you get thrown into competition with businesses that sell DIY projects? Are you a professional whose services are sold as a value added proposition? How difficult is it for you to show your customers the value of your services?

Finally, do you behave as a consumer the way you expect your customers to? Are you willing to pay for services or do you expect low prices at the same time you expect high levels of service? That $1 bottle of shampoo costs more than you think it does. Or does it?

Now’s your chance to weigh in on an economy in transition. How do we accommodate the Ikeas and the Wal-Marts of the world while at the same time making a living? Where does price stop and value start?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, December 20th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets. The editors reserve the right to accept or decline any submissions.

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Have you ever seen something and brushed right on by without giving it a second thought, but then later on — maybe even years later — it comes back into your mind? How about something in your your day-to-day routine that suddenly caught your eye and made you stop and think more deeply about it?

“That’s funny,” you may have said to yourself. “I never noticed that before.”

From then on, you’ve never been able to see that thing the same way since. Maybe it affected your relationship with other, your career path or just your general attitude about life. Maybe it did not affect your behavior at all.

This LetsBlogOff theme is about taking a deeper second look at what appears to be an everyday common object or occurrence where something happens that makes you look at it in a different light. It could be an object, person or place. Or something entirely different.

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, December 6th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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We have a new batch of interns at the Let’s Blog Off building and they’re aren’t prepared for what awaits them this week now that Thanksgiving’s here. This is our official holiday and we plan and plot our Thanksgiving preparations every year with the kind of care most people reserve for weddings.

Every day this week, the Let’s Blog Off commissary will turn into a Thanksgiving wonderland as various staffers try to outdo one another with their culinary prowess. After we’ve finished eating, our tradition is to tell stories about Thanksgivings past. Obviously, not a whole lot gets done around here during Thanksgiving week. But we’re food people. When we’re not making it, we’re talking about it.

But that’s OK and frankly, we see Thanksgiving as the ultimate holiday. It’s a day set aside to be grateful, to eat good food and to tell stories. So this year, we decided it might be fun to let our favorite bloggers get in on our office traditions by telling us about some of their own.

So what’s a good Thanksgiving food memory for you? Tell us story about memorable Thanksgivings past or pass along a recipe or two. What’s on your table every year that makes your Thanksgiving yours?

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, November 22nd and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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Did you notice that we are on the tail end of another year? Yeah, it came up rather suddenly on us too and we are looking forward to relaxing a bit during the Holiday Season. If anything, it gives us all an excuse to slow down a bit before we turn the corner on the new year and start sprinting down the track of our life plan again at full speed.

You do have a plan, right? Are you still working on the thing you wanted to be when you were a kid? Or maybe you are already all grown up? Still getting there?

Did you start off with a plan? In short, the question of this Lets Blog Off is: what did you want to be when you grew up?

If you had a plan, we hope that you either achieved it or are well on your way. In any case, tell us about your journey.

Join in next Tuesday, November 8th when bloggers from all over weigh in on what they wanted to be as a kid.

Publish on your blog post anytime on Tuesday, November 8th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (and fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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I made it back to the Let’s Blog Off offices this morning after a month of roaming around the world. It was good to be back, but it didn’t compare to sleeping in my own bed and being surrounded by my own stuff when I got home at the end of last week.

I love to travel, which is good because I do so much of it. Ordinarily, I never want to come home once I’m gone, particularly if I’m out of the country. However this time was different. I woke up in a hotel room in San Francisco last Thursday and all I wanted was to be home. It was an odd thing. I missed my neighbors and I missed my passing hellos with the mail man and I missed being known.

It got me to thinking about how I see home. What is home really? As a US citizen who’s found himself abroad a lot this year, my travels have shown me that I am an American through and through yet at the same time, being away has made me better at being here. It’s a bit of a paradox but I could never see my home country clearly until I started leaving it so regularly.

So to ask the question again, what is home?

Is home being surrounded by my stuff regardless of my location or is there something more to it? I can convince myself that I belong anywhere but at the end of the day I never really feel like I belong until I’m back in St. Pete, sitting on my sofa and staring into my laptop. The US may be lost politically and Florida can be enraging but at the end of the day, this is the only place I fit so perfectly.

So there’s my take on home in a nutshell. What about you? What makes home home to you? Is it your family? Your mailman? Your neighbors? Your stuff? Where’s home and what makes you feel like you fit?

Join in next Tuesday, October 25th when bloggers from all over weigh in on what’s home.

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, October 25th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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During one of our endless staff meetings last week, we were discussing new Blog Off topics. One of our interns suggested that we take a big step backward and ask our Blog Off community what they look for when we announce a topic. What motivates someone to participate in a given Blog Off?

Our intern brought up a great point. Every time we come up with a topic, we wait anxiously to see what kind of a response we’ll get. It’s never the same and that novelty is part of what keeps us doing this every other week. But as we head into our second year of existence, we’ve yet to figure out how to select topics that invite a lot of participation. We’re endlessly grateful for the folks who come back every two weeks, don’t get us wrong here. But what can we do to get wider appeal? Are our topics to specific to one industry? Do you like it when we get esoteric, like the topic from a couple of weeks ago, “Thumbtacks.” Or, should we stick to more practical topics?

We could have just run a poll but we thought it might be interesting to throw it out there as a topic instead. So what do you look for in a Blog Off? Good or bad we can handle it. Just let us know what this thing means to you and what motivates you to participate or not.

Sound good? Join us on Tuesday, 11 October and weigh in on what is a Blog Off?

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, October 11 and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” – Mark Zuckerberg, founder Facebook, on privacy.

What is this thing called privacy? A lot of people have ideas about what it is, but when you try to nail it down to one definition, it gets a bit slippery.

In the United States, many point to the Constitution saying it does not explicitly guarantee privacy while many say it is contained in the Fourth Amendment. Others around the world like London and Tokyo live with cameras everywhere and shrug them off as a necessary evil for our modern society.

Is privacy necessary? What say you?

For this LetsBlogOff, talk about privacy. Or the lack of privacy. Or the whole nature of privacy. Address the issue of privacy any way you want.

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, September 27th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff (or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution) so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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During the last LBO theme decision meeting, I admit I got a little bored with the discussion back and forth about the selection of topics being bandied about, so I did what the ADHD kids are all doing these days during boring meetings.

I checked out my Facebook wall.

The first update that caught my eye was from the novelist and essayist, Jane Devin. She wrote “I think some bloggers could write about thumbtacks and their ‘community’ will be pleased.”

I immediately had a crazy idea for which I got laughed at. Fortunately, everyone was getting really tired and Jersey Shore was about to come on so they were all ready to end the meeting. “Fine,” they said, “do your crazy idea.” A ringing endorsement!

Here is the theme: thumbtacks

I’m betting we have a community that can take a theme as banal as thumbtacks and come up with a collection of blog posts that are witty, entertaining and pretty darn exciting to read. Heck, we may even learn a thing or two about thumbtacks. I’m dang sure we’ll see some confessions for which the statute of limitations has long expired.

And to sweeten the pot just a little (and ease my guilty conscience for stealing her idea) for every #letsblogoff post published on Tuesday, Sept 13, my corporation will donate $10 to Jane’s Kickstarter fund. (Feel free to make your own donation… and buy her book Elephant Girl. It is amazing.)

So there it is, folks: thumbtacks. No additional prompts, no questions, no more clues. Run with it however you wish! (carefully, though.. those pointy ends are pretty sharp and we’re not going to be responsible for any accidental impaling or goring, ok?)

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, September 13th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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At the Blog Off offices, we’re a pretty literate bunch and we know that the people drawn to participate in our bi-weekly Blog Offs are too. We’re forever prattling on about the latest thing we’ve read, what we’re reading now and what’s on our reading lists.

We’re more or less evenly split over whether or not we read on e-readers or if we prefer traditionally bound books, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is our shared love of the written word. Pundits like to claim that there’s some sort of “dumbing down” going on globally, and while it’s true that there’s a coarseness to pop culture, people have never had as many opportunities to read as they do today. That most of them take advantage of those opportunities gives us hope.

And that brings us to the topic for the next Blog Off. Just the other day we were sitting around having a heated discussion about the best books we’ve ever read and we’ve decided to open it up to the Blog Offing public. Whether it’s Dean Koontz or James Joyce, everybody has a favorite book. What’s yours? More importantly, why? And if you want to dig a little deeper, is the book you love literature? What is literature anyway?

So give it some thought and join us on Tuesday, August 30th. The whole blogosphere will be ignited with the pressing topic of what’s your favorite book?

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, August 30th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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We’ve been celebrating at the Let’s Blog Off headquarters all week. It’s our one-year anniversary this week and we’ve pulled out all the stops. The lobby’s heavy with bunting and the flower arrangements are crowding out the receptionists at the front desk.

In a year’s time we’ve had nearly 100 bloggers participate and we’ve had many hundreds of thousands of page views. It’s been pretty exciting to have so many people embrace this idea a couple of us had a year ago.

In a board meeting the other night, we started talking about futures and in a brainstorming exercise, we started imagining where Let’s Blog Off will be in 20 years. That lead us to the topic for this week.

In light of the nonsense that’s rocking the world politically and economically, every one of us knows that this’ll pass too. So while it’s important to remain engaged in the present, it never hurts to look forward a bit. So we’re asking you, what do you suppose your life will look like in 20 years?

20 years is nothing after all. If you remember; 20 years ago the Soviet Union dissolved itself, the US launched a war in Iraq, The World Wide Web came into being, Haiti elected its first president, the Rodney King tapes surfaced, The Dow broke the 3,000 mark for the first time, Bill Clinton announced his run for the presidency, Anita Hill testified at the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, Magic Johnson announced that he had HIV, South Africa ended Apartheid, Freddie Mercury died and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” ruled the airwaves. If all of that could happen 20 years ago, what do the next 20 promise?

We’re planning to stay upbeat, despite the headlines but you’re free to interpret that any way you’d like. So what do you think? What’s your life going to look like in 20 years?

Publish on your blog anytime on Tuesday, August 16th and send a tweet to @letsblogoff or fill out the form here if it is your first contribution so we can pick it up and add you to the list of participating bloggers. Be sure to visit all the other bloggers to see how they tackled the theme. Retweets and comments are always appreciated. Remember to use the #LetsBlogOff hash tag in your Tweets.

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