My first post* at Outside the Beltway was at 9:47 the morning of January 31, 2003. If my math is right, that was five years ago.
When I started this thing, the blogosphere was in its infancy, with most of the big political sites no more than a year or two old. There were still regular Big Media pieces explaining, often incorrectly, exactly what a “blog” was. Now, the most popular blogs are getting traffic numbers rivaling newspaper circulation rates and one can envision in the not-too-distant future a day when we’ll have to explain to the kids what a “newspaper” was.
In the last five years, I’ve written 16,675 posts here — some of them even good. My various co- and guest bloggers have added another 3000 or so: Rodney Dill (848), Steve Verdon (810), Kate McMillan (281), Alex Knapp (145), Greg Tinti (136), Dave Schuler (128), Steven Taylor (110), Richard Gardner (103), Chris Lawrence (69), Robert Prather (38), Dodd Harris (27), John Burgess (25), Steve Bainbridge (6), Aaron Brazell (5), and Bill Jempty (1). (Robert Tagorda and Leopold Stotch were also early contributors but their user accounts are no longer in the database, even though their posts are still part of the archives. According to my Fourth Blogiversary post, they had 240 and 152 posts, respectively.)
We’re a couple weeks shy of hitting the 25 million unique visitor mark on SiteMeter, which is the only measure I have that goes back more-or-less to the beginning of the site (February 4th); others have been lost and different metrics used as we’ve switched site hosts.
Thanks, as always, to all who visit, comment, and link.
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Related:
*That post, and the first three months’ worth, were at Blogspot at a URL that has since been hijacked. Thankfully, all the posts were migrated to this domain.
