It's been one fun filled year of blogging. When Gary started this blog and invited me to start posting on it a couple of days later I never really thought about what the blog would be like in a year's time. Here we are now though with 8 members and three of us that publish on a regular basis. Hmmm, that sounded more impressive in my head.
Why Blog?
To celebrate one year, I'll discuss the issue of "why blog?" It's been on my mind lately and I think there are some pretty good reasons to blog. But first, some stats - many people are jumping onto the blogging bandwagon. It is estimated that there were about 135,000 blogs in 2000 and it's predicted that number will increase in size to 10.3 million by 2004. That seems like an awful lot of blogs but unfortunately over half of them will be dead. That's right most blogs, actually 2.72 million out of the 4.12 million weblogs out there, have been abandoned (temporarily or permanently) and about a million of these dead blogs were abandoned after a day. 132,000 would-be webloggers gave up after a year. (Hurray for Milner Blog we made it!)
Blogs on average are updated much less frequently than the Milner blog. Usually an active blog is updated once every two weeks. I quickly did some research and found out the stats thus far for postings on milner.blogspot.com. Including this post there have been:
20 posts in October 2002
16 posts in November 2002
19 posts in December 2002
17 posts in January 2003
40 posts in February 2003
94 posts in March 2003
56 posts in April 2003
54 posts in May 2003
36 posts in June 2003
32 posts in July 2003
22 posts in August 2003
61 posts in September 2003
24 posts in October 2003
That's a total of 491 posts and an average of 1.36 posts per day. So that gets us back to the question: Why Blog?
Blogging is about different things for different people. For our family it's mostly about keeping in touch, but I don't altogether think that's the only reason why I do it. If it were I suppose we could just instant message or cc: each other and be done with. Blogging has a more formal feel to it than instant messages or even emails and of course is great because it is automatically archived and as such makes a more permanent record of our lives. I also enjoy the fact that others can come here and potentially learn something they never knew before - even if it is just my recommendation on what movie to see, or why I believe this or that.
One of the best parts about blogging is that I think our blog gets better everyday. We get more experienced as writers and the site slowly changes as additions are made. The Milner Blog could use an overhaul and maybe one of these days it will get one, but in the meantime even the small changes improve the site.
When pondering the question "Why Blog?" I think about the personal web pages I setup as a kid. I made a new one about once or twice a year but they were all basically the same thing: useless links to my friends useless personal pages and sites I thought were cool. I even had a counter on my page which I faithfully reloaded until I had well over 3000 hits. With the exception of one of two co-workers and my family I'm pretty sure nobody else ever came to that page, but nevertheless it was cool because it was mine and anybody in the world could come there to see something I had made.
I guess deep down I blog for the same reason I made those all those web pages in Jr. High and High School. I just have this need for an outlet and I have a dream that someday people will come here; read this and think, "Hey this guy is pretty cool. I'm going to come back here because there is something of value here". Hopefully there will be. Here's to another year of blogging.
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