It seems that so far our brave new world for the Gazette, of blogging and user commenting, is working a treat – our visitor numbers are up and people are reading for longer and seeing more pages when they turn up. We’ve entered the 21st century, as one kindly reader has said.

We’ve got two great supplements out with the magazine next week, one of which is the twice-yearly In Business supplement, all about customer relationship management, and the other will be for local government lawyers, which is looking really good.

Doing these while doing the ‘normal’ Gazette and launching a raft of new services for online has made this week a bit urgent, frankly, but it’s been worth it – so far the site hasn’t crashed and the world hasn’t ended, and at base that’s all one can expect from life.

I can now understand why law firms feel getting involved in the web in this way is sometimes so scary – it does feel like you’re opening your front door to the world and pretty much anyone can just walk right in. But as the almost incontrovertible Cluetrain Manifesto says, this new world is a world of conversations. And we’ve just started ours.