Four Years and Counting....

Four years ago I pressed "PUBLISH" on my first post at The Smallest Minority. I was the Blogosphere's newest member.

For about .0003 seconds.

I was not, however, completely new to the intarw3bz, as the current cyberpunk generation mangles it. I'd been online since 1995, first in the moshpit of UseNet, then the late lamented Themestream.com, then the message boards - AR15.com, followed by a concurrent six-month stint in the target-rich environment that is DemocraticUnderground.com. I read a lot. I wrote a lot. I learned a lot. Then I discovered blogs. I'm pretty sure (time fades my memory) that Instapundit was the first blog I ever read, but Insty has quite a blogroll, and as everyone knows is a prolific linker. Through him I found Gut Rumbles, the open, intimate, hilarious, filthy, sad, gut-wrenching - and above all else, exquisitely written - daily diary of Rob Smith, and I was hooked.

Not long after I discovered blogs, Rob excoriated a commenter on the topic of gun control. The commenter was an Irishman living in London, and suffice it to say, he was supportive of the idea. Rob was not. His "Acidman" moniker was well earned. Well, I had at that point some seven years of concentrated study and discussion on the topic, so I offered to debate Rob's commenter. Thinking that we would do it at a neutral site, I took advantage of Blogger's free offer and created TSM. It seems he had the same idea, as he (already a blogger) created The Commentary. I became not only the proprietor of my own blog, but debate partner at another on almost the same day.

The debate at The Commentary ran for four months. I did not convert my opponent, Jack, but we did conclude the exchange on this note:

So, what has been achieved? Well,

1. I've accepted the lack of a link between the right to keep and bear arms and membership of a militia,
   
2. I've been enlightened about the 'shall-issue' concept and it's superiority, compared with normal licencing.
   
3. I've learnt a great deal about the whole issue, ranging from the origin of the right enumerated in the Second Amendment through to some of the restrictions placed on gun ownership by various US states.

So, for me, at any rate, the process has been useful and enlightening.

I think that my position now is actually more liberal (in terms of my approach to gun control) than when we started.

Not quite a victory. Far from a defeat, though.

And here I've been ever since. Blogger informs me that this is my 2,429^th post. HaloScan tells me that it has archived 13,946 comments. Sitemeter tells me that it has recorded 797,726 visits and 964,923 page views since I added it to TSM in early June 2003, and at the present time I average 1048 visits a day. Technorati tells me that 180 unique blogs have linked to TSM in the last six months, and it is the 22,944^th ranked blog out of the 71 million it tracks. I am a "Marauding Marsupial' in the Truth Laid Bear's recently repaired Blogosphere Ecosystem, ranked #1,731 out of the nearly 70,000 it monitors.

And none of those numbers mean all that much, really, when you think about it. Not in a nation of 300 million in a world of six and a half billion. For some people a blog is just a diary, a place to write their thoughts and log their daily lives. To some, it's a bulletin board for the others in their lives to catch up on. For others their blog is a newspaper or a magazine directed at their particular interest. For still others like me, it's a soapbox and a megaphone. But out of 71 million blogs, most do it poorly - the majority for only a few days or weeks before abandoning the effort. There is a large grain of truth in Theodore Sturgeon's 90% Law. When it comes to blogs, I'd say that percentage approaches 99%.

But 1% of 71,000,000 is 710,000. That's a lot of good stuff out there - for free.

I greatly appreciate my loyal readership, which I estimate is realistically about 2-300 regular (daily/weekly/monthly) readers. I cherish (most of) my commenters. Y'all are highly intelligent, erudite, and passionate. You other bloggers who have me on your blogrolls? I'm eternally grateful. I find very rewarding all the links this blog receives from other web sites - blogs, message boards, LiveJournals - where someone says "Hey, go read this. It's got information you won't find anywhere else," or "You're wrong. Go check this out, and the sources linked there." But what I find most rewarding of all are the emails or the comments (few and far between, I must admit) where someone says "you changed my mind," or "you taught me something," or at least "you made me think."

So I think I'll hang around for a while longer. And yes, I'm going to stay with Blogger unless they kick me off. There are a lot of links to the stuff in the archives, not to mention the 13k-plus comments, and I don't want those going anywhere.