Nothing like a nice fluff piece in the monthly issue of Fortune Small Business, but I figured I’d check and sure enough Rochester, MN made the list of 100 Great Places to live and launch a small business (although with 100 cities - most major metro areas do). The winner was Bellevue, Washington. San Jose, CA ranked 66th. Other Minnesota cities with honors were Minneapolis, MN at #23 and St. Cloud, MN at #75.

The Cisco Applying Web 2.0 to Your Business Challenges video is a must watch for every company not fully immersed in the world of social networking and new media. Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang. I can’t recommend this video about how using wiki’s, blogs, social media and interaction is changing (and has been changing) business for a long time. Basically, if your company doesn’t have someone immersed in social networking tools first hand - hire one. Get someone in your company to give you feedback on what’s going on in this space. You only need to see the first 30 minutes.

Recently I had the opportunity to purge over 15 years of saved papers, files, magazines and other junk. With the family out of town for a few days I sat down with the goal of getting myself inline with GTD and purging the backlog of files. I had made an attempt about 6 years ago, thinning out old bank statements, but now it was time to get serious. With all of my necessary organization items at hand I started going through the files, sorting them into 2 boxes: one to shred and another to recycle. After many hours of processing all of this backlog, I ended up with a box 16″x16″x16″ (~41lbs.) of potentially sensitive papers.

I own a light weight shredder that will process 5 or 6 sheets at a time without much effort, but I didn’t want to dedicate an entire day or more to feeding paper and emptying the impossibly small receptacle that it’s attached to. I began the quest for a shredding service online by filling out 3 different forms for local shred on site services. Only one bothered to email me back (although another did put me on their email SPAM list) with a proposal. They actually recommended their ship and shred service as it would cost about 1/2 as much as the on-site document destruction process. With no other alternatives easily at hand, I opted to give it a try. I filled out the online form, provided some information about the contents of the box and where I live - the whole process only took about 10 minutes at the end of which I had a FedEx label to ship the box to St. Paul, MN about an hour away. The entire charge was right around $45 and was good for up to 65lbs.

I then used FedEx’s online tool to schedule a pickup for the package and 24 hours later it was gone. Checking the rates with FedEx’s site, the shipping costs for the box was around $15 (if I had shipped it with my corporate account) so the shredding portion fills out the rest at $30. Of course they’re saving a few bucks because the box is lighter and they presumably have worked out a better rate with FedEx - but I digress. This is considerably cheaper than even hiring someone at $5/hr to feed the paper into my shredder for me (which may or may not have gotten done in the 9 hours that would have paid for). According to the site, once it’s all done I’ll get a certificate of destruction that I can print from the website. Good to know if your a small business needing to purge some documents in compliance with federal law. As I see it, it saved me countless hours of shredding and I’ll use them again if I have a large quantity of documents to shred.

Companies spend a lot of money collecting data and shoving it into a database. Small businesses and organizations just got a serious leg up with the latest round of revisions from Google Docs. Now companies can put together quick surveys which they can then collect and parse the results of using Spreadsheets all online. The best part, you can always save a local copy and generate all the statistical analysis information you want using your statistical package of choice on your desktop. This is a huge leap forward (and a huge hit for small development shops looking to make a quick buck on a simple survey form).