At 8:45 last night, I received my 10,000th blogsite visitor since I started on Nov. 6. I felt like throwing confetti, sipping bubbly and using noisemaking devices. 10,000 times, people have come to my site, and my blogging buddies tell me that with e-mail aggregators, the real number is closer to double that.
Yeah, I know. Some A-List guys get 10,000 visitors daily, or something like that. Much is written about the power of huge ratings, but it seems to me, not enough is said about the effet of us local broadcasters. To me 20,000 readers of my stuff is big time. ItSeemstoMe began as an e-mail newsletter four years ago. I built a subscriber list of about 800 readers in 3.5 years. Blogging expanded my reach by orders of magnitude in six months.
I used to pay someone to post my columns on my HTML website. Now I do it myself. In the past, I published about once monthly. Now, I average three times-a-week because blogging is cheaper, faster, easier and better than HTML website hosting.
There’s probably about one million bloggers like me. We aren't posting for the masses. We aren't uber linkers. We get 50-100 hits-a-day. Collectively, we comprise a significant portion of an ever-growing decentralized network of distributed information and commentary. It’s liberating. It has impact and it's disruptive to more traditional centralized publishing.
My thanks to all 20,000 of you for your support, even those who arrived at my site by accident. You’ve made me feel like I can be heard, like we all can be heard. Now, if each of you could just bring one friend...
Congratulations!!!
Posted by: Ernie | May 18, 2004 at 07:17 PM