It's been almost five years since Seth Godin and his band of genius interns handed the care of this site over to us. (Us, by the way, is 800-CEO-READ.) Since then, we've tried to bring you intriguing and informative manifestos every month, but we haven't taken it much beyond that.

Well, that's now changed. We have spent a lot of time and concentrated a lot of effort on redesigning and rethinking the site. This is the first step of many.

Reading this as you are, you've noticed that we've added a blog. The founders of the site (Seth & Co.) kept one, and we felt that the redesign was a great opportunity for us to delve back into that. Besides keeping you abreast of the latest developments on the site, we hope it will provide an opportunity for you to get to know us and what we do a bit better. We hope even more that you'll join the conversation so we can get to know you better. We know that 30,000 of you subscribe via email and RSS feed, and that you download around 500,000 to 700,000 manifestos a month, but beyond that, we feel like we don't really know you. We hope also that you'll take advantage of the ability to comment on individual manifestos to continue the discussions the authors have begun.

Finally, we hope that you won't mind the addition of ads to the site. We've never had any in the past, but we've also never made a penny running this site, and we spend quite a lot maintaining it. For a site that focuses largely on better ways to do business, that's just not a very good or sustainable way to do business. We promise we will do our very best to advertise ideas and products that you'll actually be interested in, and that reflect the nature and values of the site.

If you have any concerns or suggestions, or just want to holler at us, drop a note in the comments or email me directly at Dylan [at] 800ceoread [dot] com. And, if you like what you see, drop a comment in one of Zach's previous two posts. He's the man responsible for building the new site.