From Duct Tape Marketing Blog - their weekly newsletter they profiled what I think are essential small business tools. These tools don’t all directly relate to marketing, but most perform a marketing function. You can DuctTape’s 10 essential tools here. They cover things like project management, virus protection, file sending, spam blocking and keyword locating.

I highly recommend the Duct Tape Marketing Blog as a fantastic resource for great marketing articles.

• See the Top 10 Small Business Productivity Tools list

From Business 2.0 Magazine - While interviewing with the CEO of a top Silicon Valley e-commerce firm, Scott Langmack got the idea for a company of his own.

Langmack, a PepsiCo and Microsoft veteran, was a shoo-in for the position of chief marketing officer. But then the CEO complained that his headhunters had scoured thousands of resumes and that he’d spent three months interviewing shortlist candidates. A lightbulb went on in Langmack’s brain, and he turned down the job.

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From Fortune - When Google spent $1.65 billion for 19-month-old online video phenomenon YouTube, it was portrayed as a sign of the triumph of online video. And in important ways it is. But the voluminous coverage missed something central. Google’s interest in the video-sharing site, ironically, also has a lot to do with its belief in the staying power of conventional broadcast television and cable.

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From CNNmoney - When it comes to pay, big business commands the bulk of attention, from the eye-popping pay packages of Fortune 500 CEOs to salary comparisons of the rank-and-file at the world’s largest corporations.

But half of all private-sector employees make their living working at small businesses.

Salary.com on Wednesday released a survey of 1,800 companies with 500 or fewer employees across 50 industries to spotlight the earnings of small-business CEOs and of their executives heading up the company’s major functions.

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• 10 Highest-paid corporate execs

From BusinessWeek - Nick Sparagis asks a question no doubt on the minds of anyone who logs onto personal e-mail while at work: The Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) scandal has brought to the surface the curiosity I have had for quite a long time about snooping. I know that using corporate e-mail is always a bad idea for personal use, but how about Web-based e-mail programs like Yahoo! Mail (YHOO) or Google’s Gmail (GOOG) inside your corporate network? Can a company read these messages also, if they go through the corporate network? How about my instant messages?

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