May 24, 2005

EXCLUSIVE - Smallbusiness.com is BACK

Smallbusiness.com was building a loyal following of people posting about SMB topics. For various reasons, Rex Hammock, the founder of Smallbusiness.com suspended operations (leaving the site up) a few years ago, but is now back!

Smallbusiness.com will continue to be advertising support but with fresh vision and new insight!!

Rex told me that the first smallbusiness.com became too overwhelming, too quickly. It was a mindset back then. Get big or get gone. At that time, Smallbusiness.com spent far too much time and money on creating technology that is today widely available.

There will be three parts to smallbusiness.com

The wiki part of smallbusiness.com is envisioned to be similar to what the first iteration was like. Anyone who has information to share can help build it.

At the time, Rex viewed every blog maintained by a small business person as the conversations that he tried to organize into a knowledge management platform. He is now happy not to be thinking about trying to centralize that information (unless people want to share in the Small Business Wiki, which, I guess could be interpret by others as some type of centralization -- I don't view it that way, however).

The news.smallbusiness.com resource will be helpful to anyone wanting to track a wide range of news about small business. Rex looked around and saw that he had six people at Hammock Publishing who constantly track small business stories in their normal routine due to the work they do on behalf of clients. They figured out a way for them to simply click on a bookmarklet whenever they run across a story they think would be of interest to others. So, Rex and his team are serving in an editorial capacity to some degree as writers and editors as "filters" -- however, Rex and co. are not actually writing or editing the articles, rather pointing in the direction of where the stories can be found. (Very news.google.com)

I'm excited and Rex feel that I like the narrow search feature the best as it's designed to amplify sites like smallbiztechnology.com. It is a narrow search engine that will index small business information sites and weblogs (and other things like the text of books on Amazon.com).

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