As of 9:37, this site is one year old. My, how time flies.
There have been a total of 4763 entries and 9611 reader comments (not counting those on the old Blogspot site using backBlog). That’s a lot of content!
The critics seem to agree that, of all the sites out there, this is one of them:
“LOTS OF GOOD STUFF!” – Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit
“A warblog that’s worth reading!” – Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit
“He’s good. Read him.” – Stephen Green, VodkaPundit
“Highly intelligent and articulate.” – Economist Brad DeLong
“Definitely not an idiot!” – Kevin Drum, CalPundit
“A member of the blogosphere elite!” – This Week with C.J.
“Some pocket-Reynolds.” – Aaron Haspel, God of the Machine
“A wicked, wicked man.” – Meryl Yourish
I’ve had 270,000-odd unique visits and 419,000 page views as counted by SiteMeter* since opening for business. That’s hardly meteoric–Glenn Reynolds was getting 1.76 million monthly visits by the time InstaPundit was up this long. Kevin Drum was getting 300,000 monthly visits and had over a million total by CalPundit’s first blogiversary. Daniel W. Drezner had well over 300,000 visits by the time his eponymous blog turned one–but it’s certainly much more than I’d have predicted. And with virtually no help from Google, which still doesn’t seem to realize I moved off of BlogSpot last April. (I get seven times more traffic from MSN and twice as many visits from Yahoo as from Google, despite Google’s overwhelming popularity. Most of the Google hits seem to come to this throw-away post on Dear Prudie, likely the blogspot archived version.)
The site has evolved somewhat over the year, with the quantity of posts gradually tapering off but the length trending upwards. The quality is something you can judge for yourself. As Steven Taylor has noted, we beta tested our blogs on each other before going live:
In some ways we’ve both been blogging for years, sending e-mailed news stories back and forth with commentary since 1998 (and many an “indeed” was shared well before we knew who InstaP was), but I think he would agree that blogging for a broader audience is more fun.
Indeed. I’m still doing essentially what I was doing then: Reading things I would have read anyway, giving a quick take on it, and hitting “send.” The only real difference is that instead of one or two people reading and commenting on it, 1000-1500 are part of the interaction.
The blog has changed my reading habits somewhat. A year ago, I read InstaPundit and the Daily Dish a few times a week and a handful of other sites every now and again. I was mainly reading print sources and their online offshoots. I also watched a lot more television news and punditry. Because blogging on what I’m reading is now almost always in the back of my mind, I’m now getting a lot more of my information from “linkable” sources. And because blogging is by its nature an interactive process, I’m reading, or at least skimming, dozens of sites a day. Overall, this has been a positive shift–I get more information, quicker, and with a much more diverse critical interaction. I’ve largely lost patience with television news and had essentially stopped watching it altogether until getting TiVo in October, which makes it easier to record multiple programs and fast forward through the bloviating guests with the memorized talking points.
I’ve also quit worrying about whether any particular thing I was writing about was going to get linkage. With the exception of the quite popular Blog Chicks Pix, I’ve been rather unsuccessful at predicting what would amuse or interest people. Often, what I think is a rather profound, original post–or a particularly clever joke–gets no reaction at all while the most offhanded comment will get fifteen links and an InstaLanche. So, I largely just write to amuse myself or organize my own thoughts on an issue and hope that my readers will find enough of what I’ve written to be worthwhile to keep coming back.
Thanks again to all the folks I mentioned at the six month point, everyone on the Top Referrers list, the reciproll, and all the regular readers and commenters.
*I didn’t install the counter until February 4th but was getting hardly any traffic at the beginning.
