EkaBlog - Site Blog for Ekaweeka the Small Business Community

We're working away at a new feature, while looking at users and items you'll see all the categories the item or user you see is categorized in. This will help users to understand how they are categorized and who else they are categorized with. It will also get everyone and their items more visibility. This feature should be rolled out in the next 24 hours.

We've seen a little bit of everything lately, but in general we're ready for the next steps. The event system is completed but there are a couple small issues that need to be cleaned up before it's released to the public. Meanwhile we've got some less useful but still exciting stuff in the works, including an MP3 player and a an ajax drag and drop method for organizing top friends.

We've been gearing up for a press release and also have started planning our first series of events. The events will be semi casual, we hope they are a way for Ekaweeka users and their friends to mingle and see what each other does. We will let people put their creation and product or service on display to show and / or sell. If you would like to feature your work at one of our events, let us know. We'll most likely start with events in Los Angeles and New York and then move into San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

Three and half months after launching the site we now have 240 users in 36 categories, and 120 Items in 16 categories. People ask how we're doing and I am happy to say that we're doing very well. The data maybe not bring corporate development executives knocking on our doors, but Ekaweeka much like its users is growing naturally and monetary motivation is not the carrot we're chasing. Our carrot is to develop an authentic and relevant community for small businesses. So while by measure of advertising revenues we may not be terribly attractive, by measure of the culture and variety of businesses and creatives on the site we've already struck gold.

It's important that our users understand the difference I'm making here. Most of the users on Ekaweeka have a day job in addition to running their small business. They dream of quitting their day job and pursuing their passion full time. So they can easily bog down in the slowness of achieving their independence. This slowness shouldn't be confused for failure. Any of them with enough focus and patience can turn their business into a full time endeavor that pays the bills without supplemental income. What is important until achieving financial independence is recognizing the progress that has been made. Every victory is a step forward and seeing that helps to stay on track.

Cities, Trees, and People all grow at a natural organic pace. Small Businesses often feel pressured to go from idea to profitable overnight. Some of the best creations, organizations, inventions, and artwork took years to mature so why do we feel pressured to move faster then them? The way we see it here in Ekaweeka Land; nearly all of the 240 users on Ekaweeka are exactly the type of folk we want on the site. 240 artists, designers, computer programmers, actors, photographers, event coordinators... 240! Thats huge!. As long as we continue to stick by our goal and strive to make Ekaweeka a great place for its users to meet and help each other out by design or direct influence - we are doing our job. And by providing the arena for these synchronicities we are also providing a directory for the general public to find such gems. By constantly improving all of the above Ekaweeka gains recognition for being an authentic and relevant community. And if each and every member of Ekaweeka follows their own goals and strives for perfection they too have already succeeded.

We're taking a slight deviation from all our developments so we can quickly add some browsing for photos. The original Ekaweeka blueprint naturally included photos. Pictures were a simple way for users to show more about themselves visually.

Meanwhile our primary focus was on items. Since many of the small businesses had a product or service to share and sell with the community we put much emphasis on the item. But even with all the emphasis, the users used the photo functions to share many of their works, maybe cause they weren't sure if an item had to be for sale (they don't). Or maybe because they knew how the photo system worked while they hadn't learned the item creation process. Who knows...

At any rate it happened! So today we're creating photo browsing and a featured photos section. We'll keep the featured photo selection about each photo's content relation to Ekaweeka themes. Ábrase los ojos, it's coming!

We've got a surprise for someone today... Jeff, Tiffany and I have been looking for ways to jump start some business for our dear friends Briana and Emma. They both make loads of great crafts such as dresses, hand bags, blankets, pillows, greeting cards etc. but when it comes to getting their stuff in the shops things get a little complicated. E & B both have no problem making their precious crafts but they get a little stage fright with just the thought of asking someone to put it in their shop's display window.
I have to sympathize - sometimes making that last step after doing all the work can be the most difficult part. It reminds me of trying to talk to girls when I was in grade school. All the fear of rejection would start to well up inside my belly and I couldn't raise the courage to go and talk to one of them. The irony of it all is that the more rejections you get the easier it is to speak to people about these things. So in a way the very first time you ask a shop owner to consider selling something you made is the most difficult. Each time after becomes easier and easier until you're a pro.
In the past I've offered and nearly followed through in taking Bri's stuff to the local boutiques to see if they would sell them but other silly things got in the way. So after going over it with Jeff and Tiff on Saturday - we've decided it will be our little surprise for her birthday - hopefully by the time she gets home today her items will already be on display in some amazing boutiques in Santa Monica!
I'll make sure to follow up for all the small business readers in the Ekaweeka community. If we can get their stuff on these stores there is no reason why anybody else wouldn't be able to.

As always - we're looking for ways to bring Ekaweeka users together and help everyone else understand the community. So we've added a little box to the home page for media clips. So far we've found some great animations to put up there, also a boutique meet and greet from Toronto, and in the past couple days we've given our friends Jimmy and John DiResta from HGTV's "Hammered" a feature. If you have any videos that might be appropriate let us know, we'd love to share them with everyone!

Have a great weekend Ekasters! We're going camping out at Point Mugu in Malibu. We'll make sure to take pictures for everyone. See you Monday :-)

Here here Anne from Hunter Kirby Design.
It feels like everyday there are new designs loaded on her Ekapage and she's volunteered to help us with our upcoming events. Check out her page to see more awesome original work.

Today's awesome Ekaster is Greg and Gbiz Printing. Greg helped us by participating in one of the first item sales. Gbiz can print just about anything on a T-Shirt as long as you can email a jpg of the design to them. Totally affordable - totally awesome! Check out the Gbiz Ekaweeka profile they have tons of pics of other designs they've printed.

This just in! After ... welll *ehhemm* - WAY TOO LONG! We have finally installed the mp3 player. Take it for a swing, give your profile more feel and fun for the people who view you by adding a tune to your page. Also, we've included a link "keep listening" which opens the song in a popup window for those who wish to keep listening to a song as they browse. Song sizes are limited to 6 Megabytes which should be enough to host and 128bit encoded 4 minute song, if it becomes a problem we'll make the upload size bigger

Is there a local newspaper, weekly, or other journal in your neighborhood that might be interested in writing a story about the small business community on Ekaweeka? If so let us know, part of our job is to keep a fresh stream of people coming to the site. Doing so helps spread the word about the gold-mine of small businesses on Ekaweeka. If you do know of a local publication, send us the title and any other info that might help us contact the editor/writer for that beat. Got other ideas? Send us an email: info (at) ekaweeka.com.