Wizblog

One Year Old

It's Wizblog's blogiversary, and I'm afraid the impact of its first year on man and civilization cannot yet be accurately measured. That's something for historians and the passing of time to sort out. But seriously folks....I'm here all week.

There's something to be said for perseverance I guess. Since I had no delusions of grandeur at the outset of this project, there is no disappointment at remaining a relative unknown in a sea of blogs, good, bad and ugly. One year out from that first post, I still work at this blog with no greater goal in mind other than to share information that I find interesting, informative, important, or humorous with anyone else who cares to look at it. Along with that stuff, as blessing or curse, the reader gets my commentary.

Sure I'd like more readers, more traffic, more comments. More is better. I need to learn more about how to market this thing. It's taken me a year just to convince myself that I have something worth marketing, and I still wonder about that. I suppose that as long as it's free, it will continue to be worth what people pay for it. I would welcome suggestions along those marketing lines from any and all fellow bloggers.

I came to find out a few months into Wizblog, that mine was one of hundreds that were "born" at about the same time. Unlike this one, many of the other blogs started in response to the imminent war in Iraq, either to support or to oppose it as their primary raison d'etre. And while I became preoccupied at times with the war and its aftermath, the timing was coincidental, not causal. I look forward to year two with a mixture of excitement and dread. Because as the war was the defining event of 2003, the campaign and the election will be in 2004. And politics can be as ugly as war.

Blogging is defined by its immediacy. Posts that are ten minutes old get "updated". We are all about what's new, and what's news. There's very little looking back at all, much less looking back at ourselves and what we wrote last week or last month. In the case of this blog, its usually only when a comment is posted to an older entry that I even revisit the old stuff. So the one year milestone seemed a good time to go through the archives and try to see if there was anything there to justify the time spent and the effort expended.

With the regular readership of Wizblog still able to meet in a phone booth, I would not dare to put forth any compilation of posts as a "greatest hits" collection. But one year out, there are some blog entries of which I am still proud to claim authorship, and I've dragged a few out of the archives in the hope that someone sees them and likes them this time around. But first...

Thanks are in order to those who have thought enough of Wizblog to include us on the blogroll. Special thanks also to my son Andy, who set up the project and advises me on matters technical. So to the following trendsetters, my heartfelt appreciation:

Sean at The American Mind
Rodger at Curmudgeonly and Skeptical
the gang at democrats give conservatives indigestion
Kevin at Reductio Ad Absurdum
CP at The Lopsided Poopdeck
James at Outside The Beltway
fellow contributors at Sportsblog
Eric at Off Wing Opinion
Dan at Regnum Crucis
Dan at Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
Edward at Zonitics

Posted by dan at March 6, 2004 04:20 PM