Thoughts on Thirteen Years of Blogging
Over the weekend – on September 10, specifically – this blog turned 13 years old.
In the world of blogs that’s a veritable eternity. To put that number into perspective, earlier this year the World Wide Web turned 25 years old. This blog a little more than half as old as the web.
It’s strange to think of how much has changed over years I’ve spent writing and moderating this forum.
Twitter came into our lives (2006) as did Facebook (2004).
MySpace was launched just roughly a month before I started a Blogspot account and, when prompted for a name for my new “web log,” rolled my eyes and wrote “Anything.”
Which became “Say Anything” later.
Truth be told, I’ve never really liked that name I picked back in 2003. I chose it on a lark. Heck, I started this blog on a lark. I thought I would write for a couple of weeks – a couple of months at the outside – and grow bored with it as most bloggers do.
Because writing consistently is hard to do, as the many millions of idled abandoned blogs littering the lightly trafficked back alleys of the internet can attest to. Even harder when you aspire to have people actually read what you write.
I’ve told this story before. I tell some version of it every year on the anniversary of the blog’s founding. Back in the early days when bloggers were a merry band of internet pioneers, and few in the general public even knew what a blog was, celebrating your “blogiversary” was something a lot of us did.
Fewer bloggers do it today, because blogging has moved out of the realm of dabbling hobbyists and into the real of professional communication.
I, unlike most bloggers, moved with it. I started as a hobbyist and became a professional. So perhaps I needn’t celebrate this anniversary any more. Perhaps it’s silly and vain.
Only, I am extremely grateful to be able to spend my days writing things of substance and consequence. It is a dream realized. Something I hardly dared consider back when it was just me and a creaky old desktop sending missives into the void through my dial-up modem.
What made it possible was you readers who found the content here worthy – often of your esteem, sometimes of your contempt – and kept coming back.
I am happy that you did. I hope you continue. Because for me this is all still as exciting as it was 13 years ago.
There is a part of me, when I sit down to write something new for this blog, who is still that idealistic twenty-something kid spending his free time writing about the world dreaming that one day, some day, it might matter.
