New Link - thanks Doc Searls!

Whoohoo! Ok, trying to be a little calm, but I'm really just trying to get going with the blog thing after fits and starts for a year.

Anyway, I've been reading Doc Searls blog for a while now. He's a senior editor for Linux Journal, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center where he heads ProjectVRM (Vendor Relationship Management), and co-wrote "The Cluetrain Manifesto" in 1999 with David Weinberger, Christopher Locke and Rick Levine.

For any small business people trying to make it on the web, you will be heartened by Doc's ideas about marketing and the internet. The Manifesto's first 3 theses are:

"Markets are conversations"
"Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors", and
"Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice."

Obviously, I was out of the loop because this was quite the buzz. But I highly recommend checking out all the links above if you haven't before. He had posted on 2 issues that I struggle with often: linking (or not) and relationships between vendors and clients that both really resonated with me. I left a long comment, a post from this blog actually, and Doc posted and commented back on his blog on June 11.

One thought has guided all my web design: to make it very clear that Sandy and I are just 2 people, working out of our home and that Sandy is a talented jeweler. Well, 2 thoughts, but, figuring out how to show this, both in design and tone has been a real challenge that keeps paying off. Here's the post to read in full, but the gist is that I've not utilized linking, yet we are making our living through web sales. People dream, use their search skills and find us - and then the stories, or conversations begin...