About Smallbusiness.com
Smallbusiness.com is a collection of resources for those seeking information and assistance in starting and running a small business in the U.S. (although, we believe a lot of the information is universal and hope those in other countries will use this as a model.)
Smallbusiness.com consists of the following services (we're adding more):
- Smallbusiness.com search - A narrowly-focused search engine that seeks out answers from the best web-based resources for small business owners and managers.
- Smallbusiness.com user-contributed content - On Smallbusiness.com, you can currently three types of user-contributed information (and more types are being added constantly: Guides, Directories and Glossary. Guides are detailed "how-to" articles. Directories are ists of links. The SmallBusiness.com Glossary are definitions or encyclopedia-like descriptions of business terms. Currently, the best way to find what you're looking for on Smallbusiness.com is by using the search box in the left column at the top of most pages. If you would like to correct or add knowledge to an entry, or would like to create a new entry, we invite you to do so.
- Smallbusiness.com News Wire: a headline news resource (or, aggregator) tracking stories of interest to those who manage and work at small businesses.
About Smallbusiness.com participatory (wiki) content
Smallbusiness.com incluldes information that is contributed by its users. (translation: if you would like to contribute a new bit of information regarding small business and are willing to follow some community guidelines based on "the wiki approach," we invite you to share as much as you are willing to.)
Smallbusiness.com is a place for anyone to share who has knowledge about a small business subject and who is willing to share it. If you are not familiar with the wiki concept, it is based on a "open-source" approach to sharing knowledge. Anyone who can contribute his or her knowledge in the creation of an article, or the improvement of our existing articles, is free to do so. A word of caution, however: Anyone can change what you post and if you try to use the wiki for purposes of hyping a product or running a scam, you'll be booted off the island by the users of this wiki. We have few rules now but will adhere to the community standards that have developed on sites like Wikipedia (to whom we have no affiliation, but whom we greatly admire).
To learn more about how wikis work, we suggest reading this guide at Wikipedia, the grandaddy of wikis, which uses the same software we do. If you are familiar with how Wikis work and would like to contribute to Smallbusiness.com, fill free to do so. (Use the links under "wiki tools" in the left-hand navigational bar to get started. Also, we'll be adding internal resources to assist you. For example, here is our Smallbusiness.com Manual of Style
DISCLAIMER & WARNING: The contents on Smallbusiness.com are generated by a community-supported content-editing system (a Wiki). We make no guarantees about the accuracy of information found on this site. Smallbusiness.com will not be held liable for any losses (both financial and otherwise) incurred as a result of information found on this site. You can find a detailed general disclaimer here.
COPYRIGHT LICENSE: The license Smallbusiness.com uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. That is to say, Smallbusiness.com content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others and acknowledges the authors of the SmallbusinessWiki article used (a direct link back to the article satisfies our author credit requirement). Smallbusiness.com articles therefore will remain free forever and can be used by anybody subject to certain restrictions, most of which serve to ensure that freedom. You can find a detailed description of the copyright license here. Before you contribute to Smallbusiness.com or re-use content from Smallbusiness.com, you are strongly encouraged to read through and understand this agreement.
Terms of Use (TOU)
The SmallBusiness.com Terms of Use can be found here
Guidelines, Etiquette & Rules
SmallBusiness.com Guidelines - A discussion of etiquette, suggestions and rules for using SmallBusiness.com from the founder and host.
Disclaimer
The SmallBusiness.com Disclaimer can be found here.
Privacy policy
The SmallBusiness.com Privacy Policy can be found here.
Who we are and how to contact us
Other than founder and host Rex Hammock, there are no authority figures at SmallBusiness.com. While this site is owned and operated by Hammock Publishing, Inc., it is designed to be a grass-roots participatory project. If you want to contact us, send an e-mail to rex(AT)smallbusiness.com and put "smallbusiness.com question" somewhere in the subject line.
Rex Hammock answers FAQs about SmallBusiness.com
Last updated: 1.16.2007
I've received several questions about the new Smallbusiness.com. What follows, is my explanation of what Smallbusiness.com is today, a little about its past, and some thoughts on what I hope that it will become. I also address my motives and goals and go ahead and answer publicly the types of questions I am asked all the time. If you have more questions about Smallbusiness.com, please e-mail me (rex @ SmallBusiness.com) and I will add it to this page:
- How do you describe SmallBusiness.com?
SmallBusiness.com is a collection of resources and services to help small business owners and managers (today, primarily in the U.S.) obtain the information they need to make decisions related to the operation of their companies. Today, those services are:
- SmallBusiness.com Web Search: This is a search engine that is narrowly focused on online resources that have information and resources about and for small businesses (today, primarily in the U.S.). The websites indexed by our search engine range from those maintained by the U.S. federal government to those updated daily by bloggers who write for the small business market. The decision on which sites are indexed is currently made by a human being (me), but will gradually become automated so that the "editorial" decision of which sites are indexed are made by a larger group of users of SmallBusiness.com
- SmallBusiness.com User-contributed Content: The majority of what one finds on SmallBusiness.com is content that is being contributed by users of the website. It's a wiki model of collaborative knowledge-sharing that is operated on the software platform and with many of the same principles and approaches developed in the five-year-old Wikipedia encyclopedia. Currently, this content is comprise of directories of links to online resources, guides of how-to basics related to small business and entries that are similar to encyclopedia or dictionary entries. In the future, the content of SmallBusiness.com will expand greatly to include a wide-variety of user-contributed resources.
- SmallBusiness.com News Wire: This is a service that tracks news headlines related to or about small business. It is available for viewing on the web (news.SmallBusiness.com) via RSS subscription (by topic) or soon, via email.
- What was on SmallBusiness.com before? Or, A Brief History of SmallBusiness.com:
What you see today is a second attempt at creating a knowledge-sharing community of small business owners and managers. The first attempt was built on an innovative knowledge-management platform that was created in 1999-2000. I am very proud of the way we anticipated much of what is today known as "citizens media," participatory media or social networking -- or my favorite, conversational media. However, as a business, my timing could not have been worse. We were too late as a "dot.com" and too early as a "Web 2.0" play. And besides, I was convinced then that to succeed we needed to build an aircraft carrier-sized platform that had every bell and whistle one can imagine to solve problems we never really encountered. After closing the "business" of SmallBusiness.com -- the lowest point in my business life and one of the most difficult experiences of my life -- I kept an archive of the site hosted on the URL for several years. However, the full-blown operation of the site required network administrators, database administrators, programmers and others that were not part of the budget I had for hosting the site. I returned to the daily management of my firm, Hammock Publishing, and continued my participation in and involvement with developing "social media." For instance, my personal weblog, rexblog.com, is noted as one of the first weblogs maintained by a business CEO. In it's first four years, I had made over 6,000 posts to it.
During the past few years, during the growth of blogging and such participatory projects as Wikipedia, I have seen many of the principles of what we did at SmallBusiness.com come to pass. In 2005, I decided to slowly revive the goals we had with the original SmallBusiness.com but to do so using open-source software and other technology approaches that would not required the type of investment and overhead that I felt necessary (but mistakenly) in 1999. In fact, I decided to do nothing with the website if I could not personally understand at a fundamental and functional level, the technology we were using. One of the first thing I did was to spend several months "living" on Wikipedia, learning its approaches and coding -- and most importantly, its culture of sharing. The sharing part was very familiar to me, as it was very much the same culture of sharing we had seen from the users of the first SmallBusiness.com. In the past couple of years, even at an age where the AARP has finally started sending me mail trying to get me to join, I've tried to familiarize myself with things like CSS (cascading style sheets) and simple javascript coding. Don't get me wrong: I have great help on the technical side of things at SmallBusiness.com, but I can safely say I understand how it works.
- What is the 'business model' of SmallBusiness.com? This is a lot easier to explain today than it was in 1999. I was nearly thrown out of a presentation to a group of "technology angel investors" in Atlanta once when I suggested a viable business model (again, think pre-Google Adsense program) would be keyword search advertising tightly focused on an audience of business owners who were in the process of doing research regarding a purchasing decision. With the overhead structure we are now using for SmallBusiness.com, it doesn't take much to achieve what business plans describe as "cash-flow positive" (or, as we say around here, positive cash flow). My business is not SmallBusiness.com, however. It's Hammock Publishing, a custom-media company that develops and manages customer and member media programs for national associations, corporations and other institutions. The core of our mission is helping clients who have customer and members who are small business owners. SmallBusiness.com is a great laboratory for my staff and me to continue our journey to understand how companies and associations can build deeper relationships with their members and customers -- relationships based on trust, collaboration and conversation. I want SmallBusiness.com to serve all members of the small business community and that means we will also serve those members of the community who develop and market products and services for small business owners. I'll be working with those companies to find the correct ways to use this platform and other social media tools to communicate with their customers and to reach new ones. I'm sure that some of my ideas will be controversial in some quarters and some of them may or may not work. But that's okay. We'll be transparent in our motives and practices. Today, that's enough of a business model to justify my investment of a little money and a lot of time and passion.
- Do you have plans to sell SmallBusiness.com? Not currently.
- Are you looking for investors? No.
- What is the incentive for people to share information (to contribute content) on SmallBusiness.com? This is one of those questions I used to received before we launched the first version of SmallBusiness.com in 2000. After we had a thousand or so folks sharing thousands of articles (we called them "advice"), the question died down, however, I'm getting it again. Now, it's more like, "If someone has a weblog, why should they put information on SmallBusiness.com?" Well, for one thing, SmallBusiness.com is not a blogging platform and anyone who is a blogger should see quickly that it's not a competition for what they do. Rather, it's a means for them to gain some visibility for their weblog. For example, everyone who shares information on SmallBusiness.com can on which they can link to their weblog. The "history" link of any page displays who has worked on it and has a link to the user pages. We are going to feature active contributors on the front of SmallBusiness.com and on the Community portal as a means to help them gain even more visibility. Beyond that incentive, I have learned there is a tremendous community of individuals who know a lot about a particular topic and are happy to share it because they want others to succeed. Malcom Gladwell in his book, The Tipping Point, describes a group of people called "mavens" who feel a calling to share what they know about a topic. Those are the individuals who share on SmallBusiness.com.
- Are there any 'new' principles at work on the current version of SmallBusiness.com that weren't a part of the first version? In five years of blogging and before that, two years of developing and managing a large knowledge-management platform and community, I've slowly evolved certain beliefs regarding what something like SmallBusiness.com should be. For example, in hindsight, I believe there was too much about the first SmallBusiness.com that was locked into the site. (My techy friends have a derogatory term for such an approach that doesn't allow for the easy export of data: a roach motel.) I want users of SmallBusiness.com to have their own identities on their own websites and blogs -- that's why we're not hosting weblogs and are encouraging users to link out to their own websites and blogs from our User pages. When we shut down the operational version of SmallBusiness.com in 2001, for several years I left all of its content in an archive so that users could export any of their contributions. However, there was still much about the data folks had contributed that made it difficult for them to export. With our current wiki platform and with the share-and-share-alike approach to the licensing permit we are granting permission that anything found on the wiki-portions of SmallBusiness.com can be used by anyone (as long as they credit the source) for any purposes they'd like. Also, I've decided this time around that "features" will follow needs, not predict them. I've already decided that the wiki tools, unfortunately, discourage participation by and contributions from the non-geeky contributor. We're working on ways to simplify the interface and the "user-experience." However, we're not going to throw lots of resources at bells and whistles. We're more concerned with creating a community of contributors than in adding cool features.
- The U.S. centricity nature of SmallBusiness.com: I'm sorry. I had to start somewhere. So I started with the place I live. I've know from experience that much about running a small business is universal. However, laws and customs and certain practices are very country-by-country and culture-specific. Our licensing permit allows for anyone to use the content found on SmallBusiness.com for adaptation for another country-specific site. As our volunteer base grows, we'll support those efforts more directly.
- Would you like me to continue? Please email me (rex @ SmallBusiness.com) your questions and I will answer them here.
- Updates about SmallBusiness.com are posted on our blog.
