Here's a very brief weather report: Heavy rains hit parts of the UK in recent days.  Then, as waters rose, a number of small businesses were affected.  Fortunately, the Federation of Small Businesses has stepped in to help some companies stay open and get back on their feet.

read more

A long goodbye to Oprah (and the Oprah Effect). It's official. Oprah Winfrey will announce to viewers on today's show that she will be retiring from her long-running talk show at the completion of the 2011 season. No need to shed a tear for Oprah, who has amassed a fortune reportedly in the neighborhood of $2.7 billion. Instead, think of all those businesses who will no longer feel the benefit of the so-called Oprah Effect, a significant surge in business thanks to a product mention on Ms. Winfrey's show. Here's a look at some Inc. 500 companies who have felt the spoils of the Oprah Effect and will surely be sad to see her go.

How to deal with complexity. Leading a hyper-growth company means managing ongoing complexity. Venture capitalist Fred Destin asked ex-Match.com VP Joe Cohen, founder of Seatwave, Europe's largest ticket exchange, for his notes on how to do it well. Beyond the expected nuggets of wisdom--such as push your employees beyond what they think they're capable of and they'll feel empowered to deliver, or oversimplify and execute well--there are a couple surprises. For example, Cohen recommends ignoring the first request for anything. "If it's really important then they will ask again." He also suggests leaving the office each day with zero emails in your inbox and leaving the office once a week in the middle of the day to hang out with your family, even if only for half an hour. (Hat tip, peHUB)

Learning to live with the big-box stores. When the hardware giant Lowe's announced they were opening a new store in the Baltimore area, you would expect the normal outcry from the local mom-and-pops. Instead, as the Baltimore Sun reports, local hardware stores have taken a surprisingly calm outlook on the new development. The small-business owners interviewed said they believe that local stores and the big guys both have their niche customers and that the two factions can co-exist. As one hardware-store owner said, "Do I want a Lowe's there? No. Am I terrified of it? No. People will still find us."

The coming war for the web. In a blog post and a keynote speech earlier this week, Tim O'Reilly, the publishing entrepreneur and tech guru, warns of an impending "war for the web." O'Reilly observes that the dominant companies--Facebook, Google, and Apple--have made moves that attempt to wall off their offerings from those of other companies, which could make it more difficult for startups to gain traction and could eventually stifle innovation. "[I]t is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today," O'Reilly writes. He urges those developing new Web applications to "place your bets now on open systems" rather than cutting exclusive deals with the big players.

Goldman Sachs: the new Dear Abby for small businesses. Earlier this week we told you about how two icons of corporate America--Warren Buffet and Goldman Sachs--were teaming up to inject $500 million into the small business sector . In the wake of the announcement, the Wall Street Journal reports that the investment bank is quickly morphing into "a Dear Abby of small-business woe," with hundreds of inquiries from small businesses eager to get their share. The five-year gift will hardly buck the overall decline in small-business lending, notes the Journal. And not all entrepreneurs see Goldman's contribution as laudatory. Andrea Audibert, who runs Trinity Construction & Investment out of Slidell, Louisiana says, "Goldman Sachs was part of what the problem was," adding that any potential help would merely constitute "a little retribution." Goldman's been all over the headlines recently. Today its investors expressed their frustration over the size of its bonus pool, which is on track to be the biggest in the firm's 140 year-history (about $717,000 a person a person for 2009).

Black Friday bargains for small businesses. The day after Thanksgiving, lovingly coined "Black Friday," is historically known as the best day of the year for bargain shoppers. For small businesses, it's also a potential gold mine. USA Today offers several suggestions for making Black Friday a more painless experience, such as creating a list of things your business needs beforehand, shopping online for even better sales, and hitting up office-supply stores for all your business-related equipment.

Radical Twitter overhaul. Stop the presses! Twitter has changed its homepage prompt from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" Valleywag asks a linguist what this means and parses: "Twitter's new slogan reflects the microblogging service's evolution from a venue for self expression into a forum for conversation, according to Welsh linguist David Crystal." The gossip blog translates: "So Twitter's users have, at the very least, moved beyond mere navel gazing and into arguing."

Success in the mobile sphere. Some companies have definitely found ways to profit in the mobile market, but how many can say that one quarter of their users sign up on a mobile phone? Well, for one, Pandora can. The internet radio site, which has 38 million highly vocal users and counting, sees half of its first time users try it out on their iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerrys, according to GigaOM. Find out more about how to get your brand out to the mobile world.

More from Inc. Magazine:

Get this delivered to your inbox.

Follow us on Twitter.

Friend us on Facebook.

By now you've probably heard of Answers OnStartups, the new Q&A community for any topic about startups and entrepreneurship. If not, here's Dharmesh's announcement.

I have the good fortune of being asked to co-moderate the site with Dharmesh, probably as a result of the popularity of a few provocative but useful guest-posts here on OnStartups. (Note to those of you hoping to expand your influence in the blogosphere and beyond -- take the advice from Leo and Darren and Mary and, I suppose, me: Guest-posting is a good way to do it!)

What does "moderation" mean, you ask? I took it mean "Get the CSS in order, make sure there are no JavaScript errors, and correct everyone's spelling errors. Oh, and be the #1 highest reputation person on the site." Durn, that last one actually took some effort... (Yes I see you gaining on me Alex!)

But, you know, it's not a competition. Yeah, right. That's why there's voting and reputation, 'cause it's not a competition. Riiight.

As some of you know, there was an unexpected problem with the site at the beginning. See, Answers OnStartups is built on the same technology as StackOverflow, through Joel Spolsky's StackExchange program. (Yup that's our Dharmesh on the front page! Which reminds me, that's a good lesson in marketing. Q: How do you get your name and URL on the front page of a high-traffic, highly regarded, high-SEO website like StackExchange? A: Write a fantastic (but honest) review of the product and give it to the owners. Make it so awesome that nothing they could say about themselves would be as good or believable as your words. Then they'd be foolish not to!)

(And since I'm on the subject, and since I've already interrupted myself with this many parentheticals, you might be interested to learn that, technically, StackExchange is FogCreek but StackOverflow is Jeff Atwood.)

Anyway. Where was I? Oh yeah, problems bootstrapping the site.

See, Answers OnStartups has an automatic permissions system where you have to have a reputation of at least 15 to vote, and 50 to leave a comment. Even more for things like inventing new tags. It's smart because it prevents people from (too easily) gaming the system by creating accounts and tearing up the place anonymously.

That works well at StackOverflow because they get a million hits per day (literally), so if you start contributing properly you get up-voted fast (sometimes in a matter of minutes). Very quickly an earnest contributor is granted these permissions.

But at Answers we had a bootstrapping problem. All these kind and wonderful folks came to use the site... and essentially couldn't do anything. The only people with rights to up-vote were Dharmesh and me (because we are blessed moderators, pronounced "bless-head"), and even then we were limited to 30 per day.

So all the initial members had to run around and up-vote each other for about a week, and newbies would come in an invariably ask questions about why no one is voting, which, ironically and usefully, got them a lot of votes.

The lessons from this little mishap:

1. When you use pre-packaged software, you get the limitations along with the upsides. Just remember though, had you rolled your own you would have a different class of bug, probably worse.
2. It didn't matter in the end, because what we're really doing is building a friendly community for startup discussions, and little problems like that aren't going to matter assuming you have intelligent members. And if you don't have intelligent members it's not going to work anyway. In other words, don't sweat the small stuff.
3. Had we built our own, others would have beat us to the punch, and we would have lost the war.

As proof of that last point, there's now another StackExchange-based startups Q&A site! I'm not going to link to it because I don't want to give them the credit -- which I admit is kind of crappy of me, but in my defense I am writing in the throes of passion and cannot be responsible for my actions. Not buying it? Fine, but I'm linking to our question about it.

Anyway Answers OnStartups is better because we have a totally killer user base. Active users you've probably heard of include:

• Neil Davidson (RedGate, Business of Software)
• Joel Spolsky (FogCreek, Joel on Software)
• Rand Fishkin (SEOMoz)
• Bob Walsh (47 Hats)
• Alex Papadimoulis (DailyWTF, Inedo)

(I linked to their Answers user profiles too so you can see they're actually active, not just name-dropping.)

(I love the phrase "name-dropping." It sounds like you're taking a dump on the conversation which, often, you are.)

But perhaps even more fun is meeting all sorts of folks who aren't already famous but who are running interesting startups and have terrific, new things to add to the conversation.

Over the next few weeks, watch this space for highlights of these users, as well as highlights from some of the more action-packed discussions that are going on.

To whet your appetite, one of the most popular questions is: How do you pick a platform for a Web 2.0 startup company?

See that link for the full discussions, but here are some highlights:

• The platform is not as important as other factors. There are hugely successful companies based on any technology you can name: Java, .NET, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl.
• A major factor is existing competence. If you know a platform/framework well already, that trumps other considerations because it means you can get started fastest. Speed to beta is part of success.
• If you have no existing competence, it's most important to find/hire the best possible developers. Because it's always hard to find awesome talent, whatever platform they love is the right choice.
• It depends on whether you need to get something running ASAP or whether long-term maintainability is necessary right from the start. If the former, Ruby and PHP generally get applications going fastest. If the latter, Java and C#/.NET generally have the best tools for that sort of thing.
• Both Sun Startup Essentials and Microsoft BizSpark make certain application stacks particularly attractive. If you like the other benefits afforded by those programs, either are a good choice.
• Pick a framework that will stick around for the long haul. Ruby on Rails isn't going to be ditched. ASP.NET won't be ditched but Microsoft is a moving target. PHP itself is stoic but any particular framework is more questionable. Which community do you think has longevity?
• If your startup fails, which technology will leave you best positioned for future projects?

As with many questions on the site, there's usually not one right answer. As it should be.

So join the conversation! Come visit Answers.OnStartups.com and see what all the fuss is about. It's fun.

Looking for other startup fanatics?  Request access to the OnStartups LinkedIn Group.  100,000+ members and growing daily.

Oh, and by the way, you should follow me on twitter here (that's @dharmesh).