At Seventeen

Today marks the 17^th anniversary of my launching this blog. In 2004 the blogosphere was in a relative infancy. Most blogs were solo blogs. A few years later most prominent bloggers (I have never been a prominent blogger) “took the Boeing” meaning they began to write professionally for major news outlets. Or what were originally solo blogs became group blogs. Now the reverse is happening. People who formed group blogs are returning to solo blogging, e.g. Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum.

Over the past 17 years what and how I post has evolved considerably. My posts are less poetic; I rarely write long form posts any more. My posts tend to be about the length of a typical newspaper column. I have written more than 18,000 of them and made about the same number of comments. That is by far a greater output than any newspaper columnist of whom I am aware. If you assume an average post length of 300 words (many of mine are longer; few are shorter), that’s more than 5 million words.

I am gratified that I have achieved most of the objectives I set when I began blogging. I am posting regularly, it keeps me engaged, informed, and interested. Lively conversations go on in my comments sections, mostly reasonably civil. My commenters represent quite a cross-section of opinion. I wish more people participated on a regular basis but maybe that’s the price of maintaining a reasonably civil comments section—being a sort of boutique.

I plan to continue to post about things that interest me for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, my interests are fairly broad.