Last night’s State of the Union address from President Barack Obama left small business owners divided over his plans for economic recovery which included eliminating tax perks for companies that offshore jobs and beefing up training stimulus for technology jobs. Here is a roundup of what stakeholders are saying around the blogosphere:

Atlanta small business leaders were skeptical and angry about some of the proposals put forth by Obama and scoffing at what they perceive as a growing regulatory environment while cringing at the thought of a minimum tax on the wealthy, reports WSB Radio.com.

The American Small Business League declares Obama ignored the needs of small businesses; a major contributer to the economy as they create 90 percent of new jobs.  The group that represents 98 percent of U.S. companies (those with fewer than 100 employees) takes particular issue with contract abuse which sees federal small business contracts beign awarded to large businesses. This year that figure is over $6.6 billion.

VentureBeat says Obama recognized startups and entrepreneurs for creating new jobs, and called for reforms that would support everyone who “aspires to become the next Steve Jobs”. Specifically, an end to regulations that prevent entrepreneurs from getting financing, tax breaks for small businesses creating jobs, immigration reform, and more training for technology jobs.

Huffington Post reported that economists and business leaders said the speech offered little that would move the needle in the jobs market. “The best retraining program is called a job,” Kevin L. Kearns, president of the Business and Industry Council, is quoted as saying.

The Washington Post reported small businesses were looking for a remedy for uncertainty. “Especially for small businesses, the threat of new taxes and changing regulations goes right to their bottom line,” Dan Danner, president of the National Federation of Independent Business is reported as saying ahead of the SOTU address.

Speaker of the House John Boehner blogged that despite Obama’s claim that he wants to expand tax relief to small businesses, tax hikes tell a different story.

This fall New York will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will train kids to develop software, reports Mashable.

In protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act, popular Web sites such as Reddit, Boing Boing, and Wikipedia will go dark Wednesday, displaying only a message about their opposition to the controversial bill, reports The Washington Post.

Facebook and Google told the Delhi High Court Monday they cannot block offensive content that appears on their services, ZDNet reports. The two Internet giants are among 21 companies that have been asked to develop a mechanism to block objectionable material in India, and the Indian government has given the green light for their prosecution.

Total, France’s largest oil company, bought a $2.32 billion stake in Ohio’s Utica shale region from Chesapeake Energy and EnerVest, Bloomberg reports.

Meet Ted Weschler, a Warren Buffett disciple who has become one of a few candidates to replace the Oracle of Omaha as chief investment officer at Berkshire Hathaway, Deal Journal reports.

Deal makers are growing confident that 2012 will be better for business than 2011, DealBook reports. Not only do they point to cheap financing and the large amounts of cash on corporate balance sheets, but they say that companies that have already cut costs may decide that they need to make acquisitions to drive growth in the face of a tepid economy.

Verizon Wireless has reversed its decision to charge a $2 fee for one-time telephone and online bill payments after a storm of criticism from consumers and the U.S. communications regulator.

Occupy protesters say they are making their own Facebook, Wired.com reports.

If the last decade was all about open source, the next decade will be about open APIs. However, as with open source, APIs aren’t necessarily a guarantee of billions in the bank, Matt Asay writes in The Register.

“As baffling as it may seem, HP was trying to rid itself of Palm without taking a loss on its purchase”, a source with knowledge of the negotiations told MobileBeat.

(This article by Michael Wolf originally appeared in GigaOm.)

(GigaOm) – While 2011 was a big year for political unrest, another uprising was afoot in the world of content creators and artists. Everywhere you look, artists are taking more control over their own economic well being, in large part because the Internet has enabled them to do so. You see it in all forms of content, from books, to video to music.

A few examples from this year:

e-books: Probably the most active area in large part because there is huge shifts taking place in digital publishing. From former mid-list writers like Barry Eisler to superstars like JK Rowling, writers are increasingly making waves in digital publishing.

Video: The story of the year for artists-as-entrepreneur came at the tail-end, with Louis CK saying no thank you to corporate middlemen and putting his new concert video online for $5 a pop.

Radio/Music: All sorts of independent entrepreneurs are putting audio entertainment online, from the rise of podcast kings like Leo Laporte to a huge number of independents like Adam Carolla and Marc Maron. Music artists are being given freedom too, through new platforms to create and share their music like Soundcloud.

So what is driving this movement towards the artist-entrepreneur that will give it huge momentum in 2012?  Here are a few underlying trends:

The distribution chain is collapsing across content verticals

The middleman is under attack on all fronts, whether its in video, music/audio and e-books.

As devices like TVs become connected, as books become e-readers and tablets, and music is now digital, the storefront is fast-becoming the entire distribution chain.  With e-books it’s Amazon or Apple, with radio it’s iTunes, with video it’s Google/YouTube, Netflix and other upstarts who are investing in original content, or simply direct-to-consumer efforts using web-payment platforms like Paypal.

Louis CK, who created his own site, paid for bandwidth, and used Paypal for payment, captured how many artists are beginning to think when he said in an interview with Bill Simmons that he “didn’t want to cut out the middleman, I just didn’t need one. There wasn’t any reason to have someone there. I just thought make this thing and put it up.”

Content production, distribution and monetization tools are becoming democratized through the web

In e-books, distribution and storefronts have already collapsed into one, but managing distribution across multiple channels is difficult since storefronts are still siloed (Amazon is separate from Apple iBooks, which is walled off from Barnes&Noble, etc). However, companies like Smashwords enable creation and distribution across multiple storefronts, while Vook, post-pivot, is working on SaaS tools to create e-books and manage their distribution, complete with reporting and management dashboards.

In music, artists are starting to embrace sites like Soundcloud to create music and share it, while others direct-to-fan sites like Topspin Media are enabling artists to create commerce sites to sell music in turnkey fashion. And it’s not just music sales, but actual concert tickets. The Pixies used Topspin to sell tickets for a recent concert, utilizing email campaigns and to notify fans and processed the tickets using an iOS app at the door.

With video, big middlemen still dominate, but that is changing as video creation and distribution costs come down in a world of connected devices. As Ryan Lawler wrote in a piece for GigaOM Pro:

“independent content creators stand to gain the most through massive reductions in the cost of recording equipment and editing software, as well as the greater availability of streaming video service on connected devices. They gain new distribution opportunities for their content and greater possibility for monetization. Consider any of the top YouTube video channels, which probably wouldn’t be able to survive in the pay-TV universe but have created thriving businesses due to the cost structure online.”

Generational shifts towards technology savvy-artists

As Matt Mullenweg put in in his New Year’s resolution on GigaOM:

“For a year now, I’ve said scripting is the new literacy. That’s something I strongly believe. In Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, he talks about “program or be programmed.” That is, if you’re not in control of your inputs, you’re not really in control of your outputs either. You’re just a reactionary force.”

Matt is right, in that scripting is the new literacy, and a growing form of artistic expression. Tech-savvy artists are creating apps and developing sites to put their art into the world. Whether its Matt Inmann creating his work and coding his site at The Oatmeal or young app developers like Robert Nay, artists are becoming coders and vice versa, since, as Mullenweg states, scripting is “new literacy”.

No doubt, the vast majority of economic wealth is still distributed through large corporate media, but as new technologies enable artists to reach consumers directly through push-button creation and distribution, there is a movement afoot. Expect this movement to expand in 2012 as more artists take control of their own economic destinies and become part of the artist-entrepreneur generation.

With the prized Facebook IPO on the horizon for 2012, the lead investment-banking role is still up for grabs and long-time rivals Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are considered front runners, the Wall Street Journal reports.

In this Deal Pipeline video, Paul Hastings corporate department partner Barry Brooks predicts that mergers and acquisitions in financial services will jump in 2012.

Banco Bradesco, Brazil’s second-biggest private sector bank, pulled out of talks to buy HSBC Holdings‘ consumer finance unit Losango on concern about potential charges related to labor disputes, a local newspaper reported on Friday.

The settlement between the Trust Company of the West and Jeffrey E. Gundlach caps a bitter and protracted dispute that turned the normally anodyne mutual fund world into a heated legal battleground, reports DealBook.

Swiss Petroplus struggles to keep its refineries across Europe running after aggressive acquisitions by former chairman Thomas O’Malley up to 2007 have given way to the current credit crunch, economic slowdown and financial crisis.

As 2011 draws to a close it has become quite vogue to proclaim the end of the gold bull market and predict that gold will fall below $1300 at some point in the new year.

Amazon.com shares fell to their lowest level since late March on Thursday on concern about sales growth during the online retailer’s crucial fourth quarter.

Free Wi-Fi is on its way to some Japanese vending machines, reports gizmag. Much like a mobile hotspot at a local coffee shop, people near the machines would be able to connect to the internet for 30 minutes at a time and surf the web.

Just when you thought you’d never hear the words HP TouchPad ever again, the miniature version of the tablet computer that caused a frenzy when it went on sale for $99 has emerged: the HP TouchPad Go, reports the International Business Times.

Next year will see one more regional Internet registry run out of IPv4 addresses, but networking experts say 2012 will be more of a year to prepare for the inevitable shift to IPv6 than an Internet doomsday, IDG News Service reports.

As 2011′s mediocre stock market returns become final, technology investors would be wise to keep an eye on these U.S. initial public offerings of technology companies for 2012, International Business Times predicts.

Alibaba Group has hired a Washington lobbying firm in a sign that the Chinese e-commerce company would be willing to make a bid for all of Yahoo in the event that talks to unwind their Asian partnership fail.

The value of global takeovers dropped to the lowest level in more than a year this quarter, Bloomberg.com reports. A recovery in 2012 looks to be muted because cash-rich companies are weighing Europe’s economic crisis before making big purchases.

The colossal collapse of Sears Holdings this week was ugly for stockholders. But if you think Sears was the no-brainer short of the century, here are three stocks likely to crash even harder, writes Jeff Reeves at The Trading Deck.

When Ind-Barath Power Infra dropped plans for a $200 million IPO earlier this year, it not only thwarted the fundraising plans of its controlling shareholder, but blocked an exit route for a clutch of private equity investors, Reuters reports.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS “hasn’t made much of a splash in 2011″, says ex-Windows Phone evangelist Charlie Kindel. “Microsoft’s approach with WP7 has a impedance mismatch with the carriers and device manufacturers while Google’s approach reduces friction with carriers and device manufacturers at the expense of end users,” his blog says.

Netflix and the Gap were among the worst performers in customer satisfaction among the largest online retailers this holiday season, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, U.S. consumers spent more than $35 billion online this holiday season, up 15 percent from the same period last year, comScore estimated on Tuesday.

It’s official: Here are Jason Hirschhorn and Paul Carr’s top fourteen worst media/tech headline clichés of 2011.

Dutch financial services group ING Group has scrapped plans for a separate trade sale of its Belgian insurance business, worth 500 to 750 million euros, a person familiar with the deal said on Wednesday.

Sears “has been a mismanaged asset,” Gregory Melich, an analyst at International Strategy & Investment, said in a Bloomberg Television interview yesterday. “A lot of traditional department stores have reinvigorated themselves through merchandising, through changing their locations; you think of Macy’s. You haven’t seen that from Sears.” Yesterday the largest U.S. department store chain reported that it would close as many as 120 locations after same-store sales fell 5.2 percent in the eight weeks ended Dec. 25.

Whirlpool investors–already burned by a sagging stock in 2011–aren’t spending time trying to figure out what the impact of Sears’ planned store closings will be. They’re just bailing out, reports the Wall Street Journal. As Whirlpool has seen weak demand of its own this year, investors are seemingly done for now in waiting for turnaround signs. Shares are off 7 percent today to $47.57, pushing Whirlpool’s stock price down more than 46 percent for 2011.

Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext have extended the deadline for completion of their planned merger to March 31 next year as they seek to convince European regulators to back the $9 billion deal.

Deal Book asks, how do you go from being one of the country’s most-renowned and respected business leaders to landing on the list of the Worst C.E.O.’s of 2011? Sydney Finkelstein, professor of strategy and leadership at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and author of “Why Smart Executives Fail” presents his list of the worst C.E.O.’s of 2011.