Just had a nice chat with Brad Olsen and Amy Laughlin. They’re involved with Revolworks.com. They’ve got a really nice looking site, packed with ideas, mostly of a “spiritual” nature. They’re ready to move on to “phase two,” in terms of what they’re doing online and wanted my thoughts on blogging. I talked until their eyes glazed (Amy was on speaker phone, so her head was probably on her desk) over.

The point of this post is to illustrate how well blogs do in terms of Google search results ranking. I predicted this post would –within a week– show up on the first page of results of a Google search on “RevolWorks.”

This is happening hundreds (thousands?) of times a day. Companies and organizations jumping into the online conversational pool. RevelWorks.com looks great and the information found there is rich and deep. It’s like walking into a beautiful, well-furnished home… but you can’t find the people who live there. You can tell they’ve been there… but they don’t seem to be home a the moment.

A good blog would be like throwing a party on the front lawn.

“The Web has thousands of halfway-decent blogs. This is one of them.” That’s how John Walkenbach describes his blog. No idea how I missed this wonderful blog all these years, but it’s in the reader now. The few minutes you waste here can be better spent on the J-Walk Blog.

Update (Sept 30, 2007): Yesterday morning I happened across the J-Walk Blog and posted the link above at 11:22 a.m. CDT. At 10:22 a.m. Mountain, J-Walk gave smays.com a nice little mention. (Not sure how this could happen so quickly because I can’t figure out the time zone thing.)

Not long after the mention on J-Walk, I heard from Keith Povall, a delightful chap (bloke?) who blogs from the UK. Keith is also the genius behind the Sandals and Socks website.

UPDATE: John abandoned his blog somewhere along the way in favor of Google+ and Facebook. Alas.

This is the kind of milestone I usually miss until I’m well past it. But a few days ago I happened to notice we were coming up 3,000 posts here at smays.com. Now, that’s really not a lot of posts over a span of 5 1/2 years. But a fair amount of jotting for a journal that started with the tagline, "I’ve really got to start writing some of this down."

And while most of those 3,000 posts are short links to something someone else wrote and I found blog-worthy, this has been a good place to record those few original thoughts that popped into my head.

And every post is a thin, almost invisible thread, stretching out to become part of The Web. And every once in a while, someone plucks one of those threads and I get a little tingle of…connectedness? Hard to describe, but if you’re a blogger, you know what I’m talking about.

I have no idea what I’ll be doing a year from now… or 10 years from now… but I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing things down here. And I promise not to bring this up again until we get to 10,000.