The Obligatory Blog: Micro ISV Digest

A round up of the week's Micro ISV news and announcements, with some relevant blog posts and articles.

Product News and Announcements

Magna CRM, a customer relationship management system for small businesses, was released. Congratulations to Dimitris for making it to 1.0, and thanks for the post-mortem.
Hosting for Helpspot is live.
Jotzel is a cool new Carnival of the Capitalists project. It's kind of like Digg, but just for business articles.
BlogBeat is a web statistics service specifically for bloggers.
SmileTag was announced on the JoS forum. It's an interesting looking product with a nice web site, but I agree with the majority of the JoS posters: the open source business model might not have been the best choice.
Erik at Overview software announced his first product, a tool to help business teams build quick web applications.
ReminderFeed lets you build a personal reminder RSS feed.
There's a big Google algorithm change coming in February... if you want to check out the results in advance try http://66.249.93.104/
Paul Edmondson is blogging the start of Hubpages.com.
Mark L wants some feedback on his new Buzz monitoring service Hypetracker.

Relevant Links and Blog Posts

Ian Landsman had some tips on cultivating your audience, and Steve Pavlina has advice for building a high traffic site. It might also be helpful to learn how to write well for the web, or even just learn how to write.
A nice piece from Gamasutra on Iterative Development Techniques.
Joe Indie has good advice in Accumulation is Required for Investment.
WorkHappy reviewed the Google Adwords Jumpstart program, summary: the emphasis should be on start.
I should probably give Guy Kawasaki his own section; Hindsights 2 and the art of Bootstrapping were both great this week.
Nola shared her cool tools on codesnipers; some good resources for code snippets.
I linked to a review of Byterun's PHP encoder last week, so I thought I should also include Ben's tip on the small business program for the Zend encoder.
Joel Spolsky started a new series on Great Design. Read his first drafts of the Introduction, and What is Design?
I found an old-but-great-but-long post on gapingvoid, how to be creative.
PicoBusiness were on fire this week, the links to Startup Exchange, Practical Marketing tips for Entrepreneurs, and AlacraWiki were all appreciated. As was their post on the similarities between agile development and entrepreneurship.

From the Forums

An enquiry from Andy Brice on the impulse buy threshold generated a good discussion and a lot of great advice.
Some advice on Reseller/Sales rates and percentages.
How to look big, while Microsoft are reportedly spending millions to look small. I'll let you make up your own mind, but there is a lot of useful information in that forum thread.