Barry Linetsky, consulting partner at The Strategic Planning Group, discusses Walt Disney’s principles of achieving business success in this short essay (PDF).

Entrepreneurship and finding your passion in life sometimes happens from being inspired by great achievements by others. So check out this series of great science, engineering, and technology stories.

Small Business Trends contributor Jim Krukral has a nice short video on how to use the microblogging platform Twitter to promote your business. Krukral also offers a free toolkit for making high quality web videos.

A must watch: Using awesome images and video, Charles Elachi, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recounts stories from NASA’s Mars Rover project.

Business Week has launched its own social networking site called Business Exchange. The site is still in beta but definitely worth checking out. Business Exchange “allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.”

The New York Times Education Supplement reports on 23 Student Innovations. Among them, Cooliris, a browser extension that transforms your browser into a 3D wall for viewing images and videos on the web; a walking device for patients in intensive care; and The Next Big Sound, a website where users can vote on upcoming music artists.

The Economist recently bestowed its annual Innovation Awards. 2008′s honorees, among others, are: Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales, Bill and Melinda Gates for their philanthropic work, and YouTube’s Steve Chen and Chad Hurley.

Business Pundit has compiled a list of 2008′s best business blogs. The winning blogs cover, among other fields, entrepreneurship, economics, franchising, IT and technology, marketing, advertising, and leadership.

The 2008 State New Economy Index, a project of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, ranks Massachusetts, Washington, Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey highest in terms of their ability to “effectively compete nationally and globally.” The index evaluates states based on indicators in five categories: knowledge jobs, globalization, economic dynamism, transformation to a digital economy, and technological innovation capacity.

The 2008 Digital State Survey, which is conducted every two years by the Center for Digital Government, ranks Utah at the top of states delivering government services electronically. As a Utah resident, you can go online to, for instance, renew your drivers’ license, purchase fishing and hunting licenses, order birth, marriage, divorce and death certificates, submit an adoption or foster parent application, or renew your business registration. Rounding out the top five digital states are Michigan, Virginia, Arizona and California.

The survey also found that “[m]ore than a quarter of states created wikis for sharing collaborative information. Ninety percent of states use really simple syndication (RSS) feeds to broadcast information to interested users and 72 percent use podcasts within executive branch agencies. Half of the states use text messaging, 46 percent use mash-ups and 44 percent use blogs.”