Who Reads this Stuff?

A year ago, our site received about 90 visitors a day. Now, we receive nearly a thousand, which means that now, as many people see our website in three days as visited it in an entire month in 2006. Who are you people? To turn the tables, we thought we would look at YOU.

One place that references our website is the National Clearinghouse on Rehabilitation Training Materials .These are very interesting folks who have over 300,000 pages digitized in their on-line library. Along with our Tiyospaye newsletters, they seem to have added a number of other articles on Native Americans to their library, listed under recent acquisitions. This is good to see, because the amount of information available on the Internet for Native Americans with disabilities is very limited.

The Spirit Lake Vocational Rehabilitation Project links to our site. They are dedicated to helping Native Americans with disabilities get and keep jobs. Years ago, we worked with them on a project funded by the North Dakota Council on Developmental Disabilities, called the Native American Family Support Project. This course, a combination of computer-based and in-person training developed into what is now our Disability Access training project.

Wow! If you look at that site and where we are now, we have come a long way. Still, my to do list for upgrading and fixing our current disability training projects is a mile long. It is nice to see the people at Spirit Lake VR still remember us, link to  us and keep up those old web pages.

Although they don't like to us, I think they only link to other articles within their own site, we are included in wikipedia, under the entry on the Spirit Lake Tribe. That made us feel as if we were really important.

The TechConnectND newsletter has links to Spirit Lake Consulting in a few of its editions, congratulating us on our latest Small Business Innovation Research awards.

NativeWeb, resources for Native communities, including Native News, a  native wiki, blogs, etc. has us listed in their resource directory for Native Americans and other indigenous people.

In summary, I guess it is no surprise, given that we do computer-based training for Native Americans with a focus on disability training that our links are a convergence of three sources, disability  references, Native American references and technology sites.

As we have been adding a lot lately on Ethical Training for Indian Nations and on Courageous Leadership training,  it will be interesting to see if next year we have a lot more visits from ethics sites and business resources. One would expect that, but one thing I have learned is that things often don't turn out how you expect. For example, we expected by now we would have 10,000 visitors a month to our website. It is approaching 10,000 visitors a week.

I really better get started on that list of website improvements now!