Business Model Design and Innovation is a great example of how your blog can be a powerful tool in establishing your authority in a field. And yes, it’s a Blogger blog.

Alex Osterwalder is a consultant and speaker on business model design and innovation. He credits his blog with being the primary source of clients and speaking engagements. He writes 1-2 posts a week (spending 2-8 hours), gives away almost everything for free, pays attention to making sure that his blog ranks for the search term “business model innovation”, got himself referenced on Wikipedia and makes sure there is actual examples of himself speaking on his blog.

He has some good reference articles such as What is a Business Model? but what’s particularly great about Alex’s blog is that he makes very good use of multimedia – posting for free his presentations at various conferences.

Here’s a recent interview he did:

Alexander Osterwalder over businessmodellen from erwin blom on Vimeo.

He also posts a talk he made on the importance of business model innovation. It’s really inspirational stuff – how to approach your business so that it can innovate competitive advantages.

First, Alex has posted his presentation slides (using SlideShare).

He also gives readers the option of seeing the 45 minute live presentation (via Google Videos). 

Even though the sound/lighting is poor (he does apologise for it), his talk is so interesting and Alex is a great speaker. 

He is now planning a book because of his web success and he will undoubtedly already have a ready made audience.

Because we are looking at Blogger this week, our Blog Showcase blog is a Blogger blog and one on Google at that.

Google has a lot of blogs – there’s usually one blog and often more than one blog for all of their product offerings. I have subscribed to many (but nowhere near all) of them on my Google Reader. Occasionally, I look through all of them, but most of the time I’ll go and see what’s new that’s important on Google Operating System. 

It’s the most efficient way to stay up to do date with interesting Google happenings across the Google product range. There’s plenty of news and revealing on little known features like In Quotes.

But there’s also lots of tips and how-to’s like 10 Tips for Google Image Search. Check it out and get to know Google a little better.

Since we talked about the importance of knowing yourself and your personality in blogging, today’s blog in the Blog Showcase is Think Personality - a blog about the importance and effects of personality on your business!

Think Personality is run by Personality™ – a company that trains consultants to “think deeply with their clients to leverage an organization’s personality to propel performance and increase profits”. Their philosophy is that:

Organizations who embrace their personality find clarity, focus, understanding, peace of mind, the will to act, and the confidence to communicate clearly.

As you’d expect there are plenty of articles on the links between personality/identity and business or branding success like how a real estate owner realised that straying from their roots and who they really were caused the business to “lose its mojo”. 

They also have practical exercises like this Soul Searching Exercise, complete with a free PDF Whitepaper on Building Momentum.

We especially like how they feature nonprofit organisations like Career Gear and World Vision as well as examples of company philanthropy. 

It’s a nice example of how a business can create an interesting blog, communicate with clients and potential clients, and establish or reinforce their authority in their area.

Because it’s Saturday and we try to dedicate Saturdays to fun things, today’s blog in the Blog Showcase is I Can Has Cheezburger. There’s no lesson today, so just enjoy!

You may already be aware or a fan of this site which features pictures of animals (mainly cats) with funny captions – usually in a type of broken English known as “lolspeak”. Some people are such fans that they even write the comments in lolspeak.  

The cats themselves are known as “lolcats” and this grew out of email forwards and geeks posting on forums and many of the shortcuts used in internet messaging (lol = laughing out loud). 

The site now is hugely popular and has millions of hits each month. The blog posts are basically just funny pictures. It is now completely automated so readers upload funny and cute photos which they can caption or they can choose from other readers’ photos to caption. These then get voted on, with the pics with the most votes getting published to the blog.

The website has a number of spinoffs including I has a hotdog (LoLdogs), Roflrazzi (lol celebrities) and Engrish Funny (foreign signs in funny English) – and many more.

You may have heard of or even read the wildly successful 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss – in it he explains how it is that he was able to create a lifestyle where he only had to work four hours each week in order to maintain his desired lifestyle. It’s a combination of internet business how-to, outsourcing evangelism and plenty of ideas to reframe how you currently think. 

In fact, his outsourcing evangelism was no doubt the a major influencer in the increased use by ordinary citizens (not just major companies) to trial outsourcing bothersome tasks to workers in India, the Phillipines and even the US via the Internet. He practically single handedly created the concept of “outsourcing your life” and the outsourcing company he mentioned was deluged with new customers and they couldn’t keep up.

His blog is both a support site with resources for the book as well as a diary of his life in action – as he puts it “experiments in lifestyle design”. If you’re made easily jealous don’t read it, but if hopefully you’re more likely to be amazed and inspired about his tales from his journeys all over the world from the Amish to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to Denmark. There are plenty of tips peppered into his travels (or maybe it’s the other way around) from how to learn languages and never forget anything to how to hack your sleep and how to lose weight without exercise. He revels in being a jack of all trades.

His book (and his blog) aren’t really about how to make lots of money for hardly any work (though there are good tips for that), it’s more about rethinking about what expenses you really need in life and living the life you really want to lead. Tim travels the world living in countries where the cost of living is much lower than where he earns most of his income (the US presumably) and is constantly learning and experiencing the most amazing things.

He provides resources to help you cost your ideal lifestyle. He says:

Create a two timelines—six months and twelve months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.), in that order. For now, don’t concern yourself with how these things will be accomplished. That’s all covered later.What would you do, day-to-day, if you had $100 million in the bank? If still blocked, fill in the five “doing” spots with the following:

1 place to visit

1 thing to do before you die (a memory of a lifetime) 

1 thing to do daily 

1 thing to do weekly 

1 thing you’ve always wanted to learn

He surmises that for most people, their ideal lifestyle is much cheaper than they think. It’s worth thinking about.

It’s a great blog and is backed up with a forum for readers. It’s fun to see what’s Tim’s latest adventure and he always provides something interesting to learn, even if it’s just a different perspective on live. The blog ensures that the huge momentum created by his book keeps on going and going until the next book.