I was recently sent a PR message encouraging me to blog about a new "social media for celebrity sightings" website called "OMGICU." (Get it?) Given the sad state of our society, the site will probably be successful. How could it not be, having combined the two greatest time-wasters of the current era: social technologies and celebrity worship!

To save you from visiting the site and increasing its page view count, here's a typical sighting:

Jill Zarin seen in Upper East Side
nnekaj10 says: "And now Jill Zarin and husband have joined their daughter at California Pizza Kitchen... Jill looks great!"

Wow, that's amazing. OMG, who is Jill Zarin? And why should we care that she is going to a boring chain restaurant? And what's up with her anonymous husband and daughter? If she's a "celeb," aren't they famous, too? Fortunately, the sightings are so far confined to New York. Boston, my home, still isn't celebrity-ridden enough to warrant its own site — though the Boston Globe seems to become more obsessed every day with the few we do have.

A century from now, historians will probably write (assuming we can still read by then) about the factors that led to the decline of our civilization. There will be numerous indicators of major problems: a third of their children didn't graduate from high school! They watched television for 4.5 hours a day! They quibbled over whether their president could safely address schoolchildren!

On the list of signals of imminent decline, there will be a special place on the list for OMGICU, TMZ, and their ilk. What could be more vapid than browsing and tweeting each other about the daily lives of the Tila Tequilas (I don't really know who she is either) of the world? What better bespeaks societal breakdown than our apparently endless fascination with the rich and famous? It's bad for the celebrities and bad for the rest of us.

There is hope, however. The New York Times reports that celebrity magazines are declining dramatically in circulation. Let's hope that their readers aren't simply migrating online.

I want to hear what small business owners think of President Obama's speech on health care, and the state of reform as Congress resumes working on it. We'll try to publish a few reactions from entrepreneurs. Here's the first.

This is from Kimberley Weatherford, who runs software consulting business Red Eagle Consulting outside Atlanta. When she and her husband started the business, they bought COBRA coverage through a former employer. But shortly after that they had a daughter with heart problems that required surgery. "No insurer would touch her on an individual family policy," Weatherford writes. "The only way to get her coverage beyond our COBRA period was to start a group policy for our company, so that is what we did."

Despite her difficulties with the current system, Weatherford is somewhat wary about what a reformed system might look like, and she wants more detail from the president. Here's her take on Obama's speech:

I think the President is a wonderful speaker. He has grand ideals and presents them well, but the devil is in the detail. The details that I'm aware of in the currently proposed bills don't necessarily support the sweeping statements he delivered. For example, the speech contains a statement that no one will be required to change their current coverage, but it ignores the fact that currently proposed changes will most definitely impact the cost of the current plans, defining what coverage we're allowed to buy and mandating taxes on insurers. As a small business owner, I may not be REQUIRED to make a change, but the financial impact of the reforms may REQUIRE that I make a change.

Since the government makes the rules, the government option cannot reasonably be considered a fair competitor to private insurance. Would anyone think it reasonable to let Aetna or Blue Cross make the rules for everyone? It's also interesting to note that the current methods by which Medicare rates are negotiated with providers are alleged to actually create a rise in non-Medicare costs for private insurers and the uninsured.

On the other hand, the President talked about reducing waste, exploring tort reform, and preventing fraud. These are more well-suited for the stated goal of reducing health care costs as opposed to current bills for reforming insurance. Again, however, we were given no detail as to how these goals might be achieved.

We want to feature a wide range of voices from small business owners on this topic. So if you want to share your thoughts, let us know, in comments below, on Twitter, or by email.

Fundraising is the black sheep of the nonprofit sector. Charities spend as little as they possibly can on it. They talk as much as they possibly can about how little they spend on it. The watchdogs, the IRS, and donors deduct goody-two-shoes points from nonprofits in direct correlation to every dollar they spend on it. Institutional funders penalize charities for spending on it; it's a cannibal that eats program dollars. By extension, fundraisers are the black sheep of the sector's workforce; second-class citizens to the program staff who are in the trenches every day doing the real work of social change.

This is ass-backwards. Without fundraising there are no programs. The less we spend on it the less money there is for programs. George Overholser, founder of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, said to me that we should "de-criminalize fundraising." I had never heard it put so accurately, either in terms of the way we treat it or what we should do about it. I would go a step further. We should make fundraising a program domain in and of itself -- every bit as important as the medical research, social services, advocacy, and everything else it makes possible. We should consider all spending on it to be a critical "program" expense. Instead of disdaining it, we should invest in understanding and developing it, because unless we do, we'll never have anywhere near the money we need to address the massive social problems we confront.

Fundraising is the front line of civic engagement. Investment in fundraising is investment in understanding social behavior, generosity, altruism, the reasons people give and don't give, why they give to some causes and not others, and what would make them give more. To understand fundraising is to understand what inspires people and what doesn't. If we want to inspire people to change the world, we would do well to remember this.

I have long advocated for equal rights for charity with the rest of the economic world. Today I am advocating for equal rights for fundraising with the rest of the charitable world. When an AIDS researcher's experiment fails to discover a cure, her lab's expenses on the experiment are not moved to the "overhead" side of the books. Experimentation is a process of elimination. The data is considered crucial to the ongoing effort to understand how to cure AIDS. Why should fundraising be treated any differently? When a fundraiser's new event fails to bring in the amount of money she hoped for, valuable data is generated that will inform the future. It should not be treated as if it has no value. It is every bit as valuable as the AIDS data. Without it, there is no AIDS data.

Imagine telling an AIDS researcher that she cannot test any therapy unless it is sure to work. Yet this is exactly what we tell fundraisers; any idea you have that doesn't work will be characterized as a liability against our administration-to-program ratio and will hurt us, and, by extension, you. I was consulting with a major NGO about a new fundraising effort that could potentially raise millions. They would not go forward with it unless they could assure themselves in advance that it would net 65 cents on the dollar in the first year. Two years later, they still haven't made up their minds to launch it. If the fundraising effort itself were considered a program expense crucial to understanding what moves people with regard to this cause, they could report to the public that 100% of funds went to the cause, regardless of the results of the event; x% to traditional program services and y% to study giving dynamics for the cause. It's a holistic approach. And it's far more authentic, accurate, and honest than telling people that y% was wasted on overhead that contributed not one cent to the cause.

Fundraisers could experiment. Fundraisers could learn, the same way an AIDS researcher learns. Instead, we direct fundraisers to repeat the same methods over and over again, producing the same predictable and inadequate results. Is it any wonder that charitable giving has remained constant at about 2% of GDP ever since it's been measured?

Institutional funders should take the lead on this. Fundraising should be every bit as prevalent on the lists of their program interests as health, human rights, and global poverty. And when they are, they won't need to be giving program grants to health, human rights, or global poverty anymore, because the fundraising arms of the organizations they support will be able to fund them on their own.