I get to go to Washington and talk about microbusinesses this week. That's something I always get a kick out of doing.

It does bring up a question, though: why do I get such a charge out of microbusinesses, anyway?

There are all kinds of reasons why they generally get ignored, reasons that I have to assume make sense to the people doing the ignoring. All those reasons pretty much reduce to the simple fact that this is America and, in America, it's just not like us to get excited about anything as small as a microbusiness.

Fair enough.

The way I see it, though, there really is very little that is small about microbusinesses. That's especially true if you look at the big picture rather than looking at individual mini-businesses.

Microbusinesses mean something, they represent a basic human impulse that is so much more than a simple, individual economic decision. It's the same basic human impulse that lies behind Christopher Carfi's Social Customer Manifesto and behind the entire Web 2.0 hyperbuzz.

The very first point of the Social Customer Manifesto is 'I want to have a say.'

In a backgrounder that attempts the difficult task of defining Web 2.0, Mary Madden and Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet Project write this:

That the term has enjoyed such a constant morphing of meaning and interpretation is, in many ways, the clearest sign of its usefulness. This is the nature of the conceptual beast in the digital age, and one of the most telling examples of what Web 2.0 applications do: They replace the authoritative heft of traditional institutions with the surging wisdom of crowds.

Yes, people want to have a say. But it's even more than that.

In a world in which people's fortunes are often shaped by the activities a handful of corporate and government heavyweights over which they have no control, it's only natural that anything offering a way to bypass that power structure will hold a powerful lure for them.

The points embodied in the Social Customer Manifesto do that for them in the commercial realm. Web 2.0 does it in the realm of communications and interpersonal interaction.

And launching a microbusiness does it for their personal finances and economic self-sufficiency — basic survival stuff.

I've said this, or something like it, many times before: the astounding growth of microbusinesses is part of a much larger shift in which people are finding ways to rid themselves of the institutional shackles that have bound them for generations. That's what makes it so exciting to watch.

In other words, people wanna be free.