5 Years of Blogging

Today marks my 5th year of maintaining Gone Mild. Numerically, it amounts to more than 1200 posts, more than a million unique visits, a bunch of new friends, a couple lost ones, and countless hours that could have been spent doing other things.

5 years is old for a blog, but I think those who attempt to analogize blog chronology to "dog years" or some other mammalian aging process are mistaken. I would compare it to the aging of a tree. A lot of them get planted, but not very many flourish beyond the seedling stage. Most blogs shut down after a couple months, when the writer has satisfied his or her itch to write a few things off his or her chest, and sees that maintaining an online diary and building an audience takes time and effort.

A blog that gets past the seedling stage can go on forever, if it chooses. The only real requirement for blog longevity is writer stubbornness. The only real threat to individual blog survival is writer distraction or mortality.

Of course, the real threat to blogging as a whole is some climatic change - a dutch elm disease, if you want to carry the tree analogy further. Perhaps some new technology or application, like Twitter only bigger and better, will come along and replace blogging as a medium, or maybe some politician will decide the internets need to be more regulated.

So, until blogging is destroyed, I die or I find something better to do, please keep reading and commenting.