We were covered in the New York Times today as part of a story about how small businesses use blogs to connect with their customers. One reason to check out the story is for the picture of my dog, Eggs. He’s in the lead photo with me.

The other reason is to find out the answer to the question: Should small businesses blog?

Our answer is absolutely! Small businesses thrive on community. We write for our customers because so much of our business comes from word of mouth. We write our experiences for other small businesses as a thank you for all the advice we’ve received from people who came before us. We write about software tips and our own open source contributions because our software wouldn’t be possible without the open source contributions of others.

The article covers some other great reasons for small businesses to blog. sweetriot blogs to make connections with their partners (what a larger business would call customers and vendors). You should buy some of their yummy chocolates. David Harlow, a health care consultant, blogs to market his services. The blog has ended being a source for many trade articles and that helps spread his name. Denali Flavors started a Free Money Finance blog where their MooseTracks ice cream could be the sole advertiser.

Update: I’ve written more about my experiences while running a small business at my personal blog, Stubbleblog.

I nominated us for Best Boot Strapped company for The Crunchies (an award ceremony run by TechCrunch). I’m not sure we are a bootstrapped company, but I’d still appreciate it if you nominated us as well:

Are we a bootstrapped company? The TechCrunch criteria is that we took less than $100k in investment. That’s true–we didn’t take any investment. The first half of this year was funded by me doing consulting work. I wrote a book, did some corporate training, wrote some articles for Salesforce, and recorded a screencast. It definitely felt like bootstrapping.

However, since August we’ve been entirely funded by our customers. Some companies think of this as a bootstrapping technique. I think of it as a business model. I don’t think we’re a bootstrapped company anymore–I think we’re a small business. (But please, don’t let that stop you from voting for us above)

It’s not just semantics to me, and it probably shouldn’t be to our customers. I meet a lot of people who call themselves founders and call their companies startups. Founder puts all the value on having the idea rather than on executing or finishing. Startup tells you how long they plan to be around, at the start but not down the road when you need them. I’d rather call myself owner and my company a business.