My teenage daughter is home sick today. I get very upset when my girl is sick. My boys — whatever.

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To understand where the economy is going, there is only one person you should read: James C. Cooper, who writes the Business Outlook column for Business Week. He has consistently reported where the economy is going. He has consistently been right.

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A CNN anchor actually said, on the air yesterday, that she doesn’t want to unnecessarily raise concern. I am not saying the name of the anchor because, clearly, her job will be in jeopardy if this gets out.

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

• Six questions to ask when you have a good business idea.
• A feature on Facebook’s “porn cops.”
• Is there a market for “conscious capitalists“?
• Can your iTunes library ever really compete with your mixtape collection? Llewellyn Hinkes ponders losing the significance of things like that.
• Some ideas for using summer interns to learn more about social media.
• Discussing the economics behind The Office.
• The design team for the National Museum of African American History has been chosen

Did swine flu finally kill media credibility? It’s an exaggeration, yes, but not too much of a stretch to say that the credibility of many working in traditional media was wiped out by the horrific swine flu pandemic that tore across the world at lightening speed last week. Oh, that’s right, there was no horrific swine flu pandemic last week. I forgot.

But for most of last week, the media did all they could to terrify us. My gosh, even our Amtrak-riding Vice President was afraid to get on the subway. The problem for many journalists is not that they became fear mongers. It’s that many (most?) Americans learned that they got better information from talking to their friends or neighbors, than watching TV, listening to radio, or reading a newspaper. That’s because to get an accurate take on what was going on, you had to either read paragraph 34 of the newspaper reports or be lucky enough to hear the lonely rational expert interviewed on TV. And those regular folks — the ones who dug beyond the media scare and uncovered some accurate information — became invaluable and trusted sources of information for countless others.

Maybe the best way to put it is this: word of mouth was the best and only vaccine for swine flu media terror.

My apologies to our Blogenberg regulars. We were down for nearly two days. Media Temple, our host, experienced a catastrophic failure. (They did a good job of communicating about the crisis to their customers, though.)

What saddened me most was the thought of regular Blogenberg visitors wandering, lost without the moral compass that Blogenberg has clearly become for so, so many.

Blogenberg will post again tomorrow, back with the kind of truly deep insights you used to be able to get from fortune cookies.

Yesterday, I picked up a pair of work gloves from Home Depot for my 15-year-old son. He’s going to help me with a good bit of outdoor work over the spring and summer so I figured he needed a pair. They are just like my work gloves — they are like football receiver gloves adapted for the farm (well, my suburban back yard).

I came home and, in a manly father kind of way, just tossed them to him. “Here you go,” I said. “You’ll be needing these.”

Let’s just say he doesn’t yet appreciate a pair of really nice work gloves the way I do.

I’m mad at myself. I wasn’t perfect at a very important meeting on Friday. I let my not-unusual-state of exhaustion and being overwhelmed get in the way of crafting a strategy for the meeting.

The meeting was with two high-level officials at a major federal agency. It actually went very well. I left the meeting feeling there was a clear and shared vision for how we might move forward. But I wasn’t perfect. I wasn’t prepared for a couple of questions so I was forced to do the proverbial dance.

Overall, I was pleased with the meeting and what I think can be a very productive working relationship. But I wasn’t perfect. That’s because I wasn’t sure of my strategy going in — an amateur mistake, no matter how overwhelmed and exhausted I, a professional, may be.

A bit more than 2 weeks ago I posted about how it felt to wait to see if we won a piece of business. I compared it to asking a girl out for a date. Ever since, everywhere I go, I am mobbed by hundreds of Blogenberg readers (Blogen-heads?) exclaiming, “Did you hear about the business pitch? Should we march, like a Blogen-army, on this unnamed organization, demanding that they hire you?” It was hard, but I kept the hordes at bay, urging patience, even though deep inside I was not feeling very patient myself — I really wanted this piece of business.

We got the business. It’s not a huge account, but because it so fits with what we are about as an organization it’s a very important piece of business.

But I must admit I only enjoyed the call back from the girl momentarily. Now I’m anxious: will she like me once she gets to know me?

Oy vey.