1,000 and counting

I've reached the 1,000th-post milestone on Opening Arguments; not bad for eight months. Since I don't post on weekends, that works out to an average of about six posts a day.  Whew! That's about twice my output for the editorial page, but it's a different kind of writing -- quicker, usually shorter, and I don't have to talk things over with an editorial board. My traffic, I'm happy to say, has been building slowly but steadily. In the first few months, when I was averaging about 200 page visits a day, I was ecstatic when a post I did about our newspaper's challenges got linked to by a national journalism site, and I got 1,000 visits in a day. Then I did a short, snide post about Barry Manilow, ticking off his worldwide fan club, and got 7,000 page visits over two days.

Right now, I'm averaging about 700 visits a day; if I hit 1,000 by the end of my first year of blogging in July, I'll be happy. Not huge, but, hey, that's a lot more growth than, um, newspapers. A lot of the traffic increase in the last few months, I suspect, comes from the growth in the Fort Wayne blogosphere. Local blogs are linking to each other, and readers of one blog are beginning to check out others; we're becoming a community. It's like fast-food restaurants. The McDonalds and Arbys and Taco Bells don't mind locating next to each other -- in fact, they go out of their way to do it. When people are in a fast-food mood, they go to where they have the most choices, and that benefits all the restaurants.

Many thanks to all the people who have found my posts and left interesting, often insightful, comments. You have made this site much better than it otherwise would have been. If you'd like to initiate a discussion instead of just participating in one, send a piece to my e-mail address labeled as an Opening Arguments contribution, and I'll put it up. Let me leave a comment on your post for a change.