To be filed with other posts about something I’ll have no need for until the day I really do comes this good short article on quickly setting up a virtual office system, in less than an hour even. Suggestions and links to help you in finding, hiring and training a virtual receptionist or assistant, getting a mailing address and virtual phone system, etc.

If you’re a one-man show, a virtual office is part of what makes the barriers to entry into business for very small companies low enough that they can be viable, and small businesses routing lots of infrastructure-type functions to virtual assistants no longer seems radical. With it you have a large office’s ability to handle extraneous specialized tasks without needing the scale of all those full-time employees…. A virtual office helps the talent (in this case: you!) keep their noses to the grindstone. (Now I just need that great idea…)

Among other things, Jonah Peretti is a founder of BuzzFeed and Huffington Post. Like a performance artist who uses the Internet as his medium, Peretti is simultaneously working with larger themes, and not just commercial ones.

He’s a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and projects like the Nike sweatshop e-mails are usually hilarious but also are object lessons in the anatomy of meme creation, ideas or messages that the world latches onto with its cognitive surplus. From there it’s a short step to applying media theory to questions with huge practical relevance, like “How can you spread your ideas and make them go viral on the web?”, the question he asks in the first slide of this interesting and humorous slidecast. If you have a ‘practical interest’ in increasing web traffic, maybe even your own, do not miss this. I’m looking for a video of this talk, though these notes do get the point across. (Just the ‘Bored At Work Network’ a big idea.)

A big gaping hole in a lot of mainstream travel sites like Expedia, Hotwired, etc. is that they are long on supplying infrastructure for me to book flights and hotels for my next trip, but very short on ideas for trips and reasons why I’d like to visit a particular destination. Kukunu is a new site that lets you plan trips, and also get recommendations as well as collaborate with any travel partners you have. These kind of one-stop shopping sites are nothing new (look at Amazon for general retail) but it’s surprising that in the area of travel I still have to bounce from site to site as I look for travel ideas, find good deals and email or IM friends with plans or asking for suggestions. The idea is great, and Kukunu’s execution looks pretty good.

Mashable has a quick list of five online tools to hit up for advice regarding runnning a small business and getting questions answered from real people. Several more good online business resources are listed in the comments, making it a worthy bookmark if you are a small business owner, or aspiring to be one.

Check this comprehensive guide to split testing from Smashing Magazine, how it works, how to create a split test for your site(s), dos and don’ts and additional resources. I found the case studies very interesting: what are the two ‘magic words’ that will increase your conversions?

Snail mail is not dead yet-in fact using it can create an impact that an e-mail or instant message probably won’t have, specifically because people get personal mail less frequently than they used to.

There are many ways to send regular postal mail without having to spend time finding a stamp (or a post office) to mail a physical card or letter. Whether you want to make snailmail part of a marketing campaign or just send letters or postcards periodically to friends and relatives, here are a few good ways to send mail online that will get delivered as physical mail, using your computer:

With Postful you can send physical mail to people using e-mail, Web forms, or API calls. You can include photos, PDF documents, office documents, etc. Postful integrates into any application that can send email. Single mailings are just $.59 for a postcard and $.99 for a one page letter, but the price quickly drops from there for bulk mailings. They do international mailing at a slightly higher price. Looks like a versatile, powerful solution, and you can try it out for free!

With Enthusem you can send printed greeting cards from the web in 30 seconds, they claim. Use/modify your own jpegs or use theirs with a slick, easy interface, though it looks to be a relatively expensive option.

You can send mail online with postalmethods.com, though they really cater to business correspondence. You can send mail from Outlook express, Outlook, Gmail etc. and they can handle periodic notifications. The same people who brought you InterFAX.

Email2postal.com will deliver a standard letter for one dollar, or a handwritten card for five dollars.

With Sendoutcards, you can choose from about 10,000 greeting cards, and get it delivered for a fraction of what it would cost you to buy a card from a store and send it. There is a $99 startup fee, but if you’re looking to send large quantities of cards it could still be cost effective. You can send postcards and three-panel cards as well.

Whatever method you use to send postal mail online, you can be sure that the person on the receiving end will appreciate the physical aspect of the mail. It must carries a little more weight just because they will spend a few seconds of focused attention on it, without your message being diluted by six competing browser windows, as it would be with an email.

Banking is an area of online commerce that too often uses the Internet to clothe the same old inefficiency and customer disservice. I get all the bells and whistles, along with disappointments like paying five dollars a month for accounts with no activity, and no notification in the form of an IM or e-mail that I might be dangerously close to getting charged an overdraft fee. (You would think that if a person is overdrawn once in five years that he’s probably not trying to game the system in any way and that his bank wouldn’t treat him like a deadbeat.)

Banksimple is an online bank slated to launch later this year that aims to provide feature that ordinary people will actually appreciate, like no overdraft fees or hidden charges. It caught my eye because one of the principles is Alex Payne, ex-Twitter API lead. Offering innovations such as check deposit via a photograph that you take of the check with your phone, it appears that Banksimple will leverage technology to keep their expenses low and their operation relatively simple. Stay tuned, I’ll review it post-launch, because I for one am ready for a change…

There are as many uses for Google Adwords as there are products and services. Even if there is only one person in your target market you have the means to micro target them, as long as they are self-absorbed enough to spend time googling themselves! Chances are that their names will be pretty cheap keywords too. Here’s how one creative job seeker did it…
Actually, finding your ad in the SERPs for their own name wouldn’t be the only way they could get it served to them. They would find it in the sidebar of their Gmail, assuming they have a Gmail account using their real name, or at least many instances of their name in their inbox.

So on eBay you can buy everything under the sun, Craigslist gives you options for buying and renting too, and opportunities to drop too much cash on new items via your internets abound.

What if you just need to use something as opposed to owning it?

What about a site devoted only to rentals of tech, sporting goods, tools and just about anything else you might need, but can’t justify buying? Rentalic.com is trying to be that site, and it’s a pretty good execution of a really good idea. It brings so-called “owners” and “borrowers” together, and it’s built with the PayPal API to facilitate payment between the two parties. The service is free to the renter; owner of the items is charged 5% of the rental fee.

Lots of commercial renting facilities charge really high prices for things like landscaping equipment or video equipment, and unfortunately they price items high enough that it’s sometimes tempting to just buy an appliance that you know you’ll use once or twice, for lots more than you want to spend. There should be cheaper rental options, and maybe it’s with people who have thousands of dollars worth of stuff they hardly ever use in their closets and garage. For them, renting it out might be a way to get some of that money back!