Enjoying my new workplace. There are plenty of good campfire moments with the team.

This business start-up thing will have to be on hold again.  I’m in dance mode again. There could be worse things in life.

In the meantime, some interesting business story at Freshbooks. I wonder who copied who? In any case, it’s nice. And I totally agree with Michael McDerment’s book suggestions for web entrepreneurs… Although I think I prefer Good to Great to Built to Last.

Now back to dance practice and the American Lindy Hop Championships.

Sebastien from praized on how the web is becoming a big word of mouth machine.

Seth Godin wrote a great article on how to improve Powerpoint slides.

There are many available tools online to build your website.

I’ve started to religiously follow Ben Yoskovitz’s Instigator Blog. Not just because he’s an entrepreneur here in Montreal.

Nor because he’s a StandoutBoy.

I read his blog because it is well-written and chock-full of wisdom.

Now you might think it’s easy to write a good blog. In fact, it’s not. In the blogging world, there are many facets to good writing.

First, good bloggers write clearly and get their point across.

We’ve come to expect blogs to be personal, thus conversational in tone, but bad grammar and poor spelling do not equal good blogging.

Second, good bloggers write for their audience and not to them.

Good bloggers are authentic and passionate about the stories they tell - and they tell us the stories we want to hear. I can’t stress how important writing “for” your audience is.

Anyone new to blogging should read this article from A List Apart. It captures the essentials of good writing for blogs.

Let me know which blogs you follow religiously and why.

After a week of playing around with WordPress and thinking about the future of my dance blog, I’ve decided to transfer it to my personal domain. From now on, my dance blog can be found at blog.alainwong.com

I know I know, this is suppose to be a dance blog. I just couldn’t help commenting on what these guys in Montreal are doing to help bloggers in the fight against spam.

Tonight I went to Democampmontreal3, and the team at Karabunga presented their new anti-spam web service, which seems to be doing a heck of a better job than Akismet at helping bloggers filter spam comments. Sign up for beta testing at Defensio.

It’s very exciting news coming straight from entrepreneurs in Montreal. Yeah!

Most of my friends know me as a dancer, but they don’t know the other half of my world. The secret is out - I’m not only a Lindy Hop nerd, I’m also a business geek.

So.. I thought I’d give my dancer friends a glimpse of my other significant half. Here’s a video of one of my favorite speakers, Seth Godin.

Seth is the writer of bestselling books on marketing. Here is a presentation he made at Google last year. In it, he ties in the key concepts from his books Permission Marketing, Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, Unleashing the Ideavirus, Free Prize Inside.