The growth of the Dish has become harder to handle this year - a first-class problem, of course, but a real one. In 2006, we had 25 million pageviews. In 2007, we had 40 million. In 2008, that historic and exciting election year, the traffic soared to 120 million. As traffic quintupled, our editorial staff tripled to, er, three.
2009, we all expected, could not match 2008. The three-fold surge was so great it had to subside. We couldn't expect another round of sky-high traffic like that in the election months of the fall of 2008. But tallying up 2009 this morning - using the rough-and-ready Sitemeter counter, as in the other data - we ended up with around 110 million pageviews, a much smaller drop-off from last year than I expected. Our biggest month was last June, as the Iran coverage garnered a truly global audience of 13 million pageviews. But we've seen solid, consistent gains since then. This December, for example, produced 9 million pageviews; last December's total was 7.2 million. December 2007 gained 4.1 million. December 2006 racked up 2 million. Get the picture?
Such numbers are, to this blog, unimaginable. But Waldo's more a bespoke blogger- "artisanal" as the foodies say. He spends his days reading the broadsheets and typing furiously in his bathtub:
WLJ has a miniscule readership, as he cheerfully posts every day. But it has proved an interesting- and interested- and geographically scattered- readership. It's hard to imagine how readers find their way from Europe, Africa, South America, Asia and Australia every day, but that's one of the wonders of the Internets. Waldo welcomes you all and is grateful for your occasional contributions. Your comments are always welcome.
In South Carolina, WLJ has evolved into a different sort of blog than it was when it moved here. Back in the day, The Journal was a blog about everything. Here, it has become more political (the "everything" has been hived off to two other blogs) as Waldo noticed virtually all the influential political blogs in this state are run- or financed- by Republican political consultants. A couple of them, in particular, go on about the decline of the dead-tree media and the superiority of the blogdom, while, at the same time, passing up on the basic rules of any kind of reporting: particularly going back to original sources and disclosing conflicts of interest. WLJ has become the fact-checker (as several other bloggers who did the job better, and longer, have dropped out), and it's a mark of the effort's value that, when WLJ gets its roughly quarterly carpet-bombing from one of the big political consultant bloggers, it has never been about content. It's been about annoying them.
Republican thinking here has become so starved and Robespierriean that there's really no communicating with them in the SC blogdom. They seem to be incapable of understanding how a Republican could feel excluded by his party, even as they lionize Ronald Reagan, who became a Republican because he felt excluded by the Democrats. Their entire thought process is one of exclusion. Even though they quote Reagan's maxim that an ally is someone who agrees with you 80% of the time, they focus on the 20% of the time when you don't. The mark of serious blogging ought to be at least a measure of intellectual rigor and the willingness to consider you might, yourself, occasionally, be wrong. Or, at least, mistaken. Or maybe jumping to conclusions before the pool is full. Even if you're a party consultant. Otherwise, what's the point? Partisan talking points are partisan talking points no matter what the media in which they are transmitted.
So that's how Waldo sees things, and if you know him at all, you have to assume a little preening will be called for from a man who types in his bathtub.
But it's all in aid of saying "thank you" to our phone-boothful of readers. Waldo's stumbling into his fourth year in the blogdom, and it just gets more interesting every day.
Happy New Year Waldo! Don't let the bathwater get cold.
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