This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg.

• Church of the Customer blog demonstrates how to apologize.
• Jeremiah Owyang discusses the development of the social web over five stages.
• Chris Brogan recommends using how-to pieces to build relationships online.
• Ben Stein explains why his summer sales job taught him the art of selling, an important skill in a world where “all of us sell something.”
• Spike Jones points out why companies should approach brand ambassadors, the folks who really promote your products or service to their friends and neighbors, as if they were best friend.
• Monica Guzman, a reporter, blogger, and community manager for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, shares what it takes to be an awesome news commenter.

From a business perspective, God has blessed me these past several years. Nowadays the street corners are filled with people not so blessed, begging for money. They are more plentiful than just a year ago. They are younger, healthier. They make me sad.

Once, or twice, a week, I give a corner-beggar a ten or twenty-dollar-bill. If I were blessed enough to give more I would. Every time, the recipient’s reaction is so gratifyingly sad. How he or she lights up when I hand them the money, it leaves me, rather than feeling as if I’ve done some good, terribly sad.

The other day, one guy I gave to started talking to me. I’m not sure I wanted that. He simply said, “Thank you. Because man, this s—t is getting old.”

Yeah.

This afternoon, I am going with my parents to the hospital for an appointment with my mother’s oncologist. Man, if I knew parents would be this difficult, I wouldn’t have had any.

I believe I have identified my most annoying quality. Given that my teenage daughter tells me I am extremely annoying, isolating this one quality was as scientifically challenging — and important — as, say, isolating the gene that causes heart disease.

The most annoying quality among many annoying Blogenberg qualities is my habit of telling people how early I arrive at the office. It’s not that I have a martyr complex — such foolish psychodrama would be disrespecting the degree to which I suffer for the people I care about. It’s that working long hours at my business is such a major part of my self-concept that I have to make sure that anybody — and that’s anybody, from the guy who works at the coffee shop to important clients — who knows I may be leaving before 5 or 6 pm is made aware that I started my day at 6:30 in the morning (5:50 this morning, actually).

It’s an annoying habit, without a doubt. But think of it this way: when your alarm clock goes off in the morning, I’m already at work being annoying.

This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg…

• Paul Johnson discusses how the Kindle is changing reading, reasearch, etc.
• BNet shares some tips on how to make your presentations more like steve jobs’ talks at MacWorld.
• Domino’s fights back against YouTube backlash.
• The New York Times follows Mike Kelleher as he decides which 10 letters reach the president’s desk each day.
• Dan Gillmor ponders what to do about the effect of all this new information on demand for that information.
• Did you know they’re working on actually programming matter? Well, they are and the geek in us says, “dude, that’s wicked.”
• Here’s how to demo twitter for those who aren’t so sure about why 140 characters of plain text can make a difference.

I’ve learned that being a good father means keeping my mouth shut some times — actually, a lot of times. It means remembering that my sons or daughter need to figure out their own way. But that can be hard. Today I slipped into being over-enmeshed dad.

One of my boys is a freshman in high school. He’s a talented lacrosse goalie. The varsity high school coach emailed me this morning, telling me that he was going to ask my son to move up from JV to varsity for the rest of the season. My son was going in late to school, so I called him to give him the heads up.

Having played sports through college, I know how to interact with coaches. I wanted to make sure he handled the promotion correctly. I was being stupid. I slipped and started to live his life. As a result, I denied him the excitement of being surprised by the coach calling him into his office today.

Shut up, Dad, you idiot.

Regular visitors to Blogenberg know that my mother is battling cancer. Last Friday evening she had surgery — major, seven-hour surgery. Going into it, my mother was understandably scared.

I told her, with absolute certainty, that the surgery will go well and that she will get through this crummy ordeal. The surgery did indeed go very well. She is recovering more quickly than the hospital personnel expected her to.

I couldn’t be more thankful — knowing that, once again, I was right. I couldn’t wait to say to my mother, “I told you so.” But when I saw her after the surgery, I couldn’t bring myself to say it, not with her still groggy from high doses of pain medication.

So I waited until the pain medication was reduced. I wanted to make sure my mother registered and appropriately noted my, “I told you so.”

(And anybody who thinks I’m kidding clearly doesn’t know Blogenberg like I know Blogenberg.)

I’m at Johns Hopkins Hospital, waiting for my mother to go into surgery. Regular Blogenberg visitors know that I know I am very, very funny. It’s not my fault that the rest of the world doesn’t have a sense of humor as advanced as mine.

Here at Hopkins, I’ve learned that medical personnel — nurses, surgeons, etc. — are also lacking in my well-crafted sense of humor. I’ve made a few well-placed, very well timed jokes to lighten the anxiety. But the doctors and nurses have just stared at me, apparently not amused.

Wow, I just trust they are better at surgery than they are at appreciating somebody as funny as I am convinced I am!

This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg…

• A recent study warns of the dangers Twitter and other instant media alerts pose to teen brain development.
• How to weather a twitterstorm.
• Moms at risk for internet addiction.
• Om Malik asks if Facebook has abandoned what made it unique.
• This collaboration between YouTube and the London Symphony Orchestra (”YouTube Smphony”) is pretty cool.
• Guy Kawasaki discusses “the inside scoop on design” with Hartmut Esslinger.

To paraphrase John Lennon: Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too. Imagine all the people living according to TMZ: