Monday, September 10th, this blog turned four years old.  I missed the anniversary, which is about par for the course with me.  I’m terrible with dates.

In the past I’ve done a big post running down all the statistical highlights of the year.  Comments.  Visits.  Posts.  Etc.  Since I forgot, I’m not going to do that this year as I don’t feel like putting in the time after the fact.  But it is sort of fun to reflect.

Back when I started this blog it was intended as little more than an outlet for sharing jokes with my friends and writing political rants so that my wife (then my girlfriend) wouldn’t have to listen to them.  When I told people about it, they were like “What’s a blog?” Now it seems like every mom, dad, reporter, television station and newspaper has a blog or two.

When I started, seeing blogs get mentioned in a news article, on a radio show or television was big.  Everybody in the (at the time) relatively small circle of the blogosphere (it seems like we all pretty much knew, or at least knew of, each other back then) would link.  These days bloggers appear on television routinely.  These days it sometimes seems like the “average citizen” blogs are getting drowned out by journalists and political flaks who, instead of writing news articles or press releases, just write blog posts.  And something was lost in that, though I still think that blogging has a bright future.

But it really is amazing how much things have changed.  I was watching a movie just last night where “blogger chatter” was mentioned in a casual, off-hand way as though it were the most normal thing in the world.  And it is now, but it wasn’t always.

I’ve changed with this blog too.  My political views starting out were those of a naive kid lured into politics by 9/11 and the war in Iraq, and they’ve changed quite a bit.  I’ve always been conservative, but on a lot of issues my interaction with you readers (in later years, the first year or so of this blog it was pretty much just me sending posts off into the void) has changed the way I think.  Has made me more knowledgeable and informed, and for that I thank you.

What’s more, this blog has turned into something of a media outlet of sorts.  I never would have thought it would happen when I started out (I never really expected anyone to actually read this stuff) but now I get press releases from candidates, interest groups, and even media outlets.  Magazines, newspapers, book publishers...people from all sorts of places send me links to their articles to read.  Or send me review copies of their books and/or movies.  It amazes me at times.

As does the sheer number of readers I have.  Internet traffic and readership is always hard to quantify, but going off the measurement tools I have this blog is getting around 80,000 unique visitors a month.  Which works out to about 960,000 unique readers/year directly to this site.  Of course, a lot of those are duplicates, but about 53% of all site visits are “regular” visits so I’m guessing there’s about 40,000 regular readers of this blog in any given year.  And I’m using “regular” pretty loosely, meaning that if someone only visits once every two months they’re probably getting lumped into that “regular” category.  But still, I think that’s in the ballpark.

A lot of my posts here also get syndicated onto other sites as well.  Reuters, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle and some other publications have been picking up posts now and then for some time.  I’m also syndicated on the local Reiten Broadcasting sites (KXMC, KXMB, etc.) here in North Dakota and that generates a lot of readership too.  Approximately 3.7 million page views in the last sixty days, all put together.

Again, though, these numbers are hard to quantify.  But very roughly and very conservatively, I think it’s safe to say that in any given month anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million people read something I wrote on the internet.  I wonder how many other people in North Dakota can say that.

Not many, I’m guessing.

Along the way I’ve also picked up a cadre of regular bloggers.  Pilgrim, Ken McCracken, The Whistler and myself keep things lively on the front page while folks like Proof, Bat One, Robert 108, Neiman, Puzzlefeet and many others keep the reader blogs exciting.  There are also regular commenters like halatbis, Anna, 2Hotel9, Mike Adamson, Carrick and others that always bring something interesting to a discussion.

There are people I’m leaving out, I’m sure, but rest assured that if you’re reading these words I appreciate it.  And if you contribute to the blog with posts or comments, I appreciate that too.

I still enjoy blogging, though some days now it feels almost like work.  If I’m slow on posts for a day I feel guilty (and those of you who email when I don’t post for half a day aren’t helping!), but overall this is still fun for me.  When it stops being fun I probably won’t blog any more, but as it stands I’m not going anywhere.