We Are One Year Old

Actually, this blog was a year old yesterday too, but we didn’t get around to telling you then.

I know many of you are getting Christmas cards with inserts extolling company, or worse, family accomplishments. So I’ll keep it brief.

It’s hard to know for sure how one’s blog is doing, since different services come up with different figures. I happen to like Feedburner, and it says we have over 5000 unique visitors a day, between subscribers (ones who have clicked in the last 24 hours, if I understand their metrics) and those who visit us the traditional way. Gongol puts us at # 9 on its list of economics blogs. However, there are lots of blogs, including some very popular ones, that don’t publish their traffic figures, so that ranking has to be taken with a handful of salt. Nevertheless, it’s a reasonable guess that we are in the top 10% of economic blogs.

One way we aren’t doing so well is in our Technorati rankings, which is odd given the positive feedback we’ve gotten, particularly from some Serious Economists. Maybe the link to Technorati at the bottom of each post is lost among the other options. One of the many things we need to improve.

Although we take interest in the traffic, what is most important to us is that we are attracting a high caliber readership and getting the attention of people who have influence. Perhaps it’s naive, but we think our mission is to encourage people to think more critically; finance just happens to be a convenient place for us to operate. One of our favorite mottos is the Will Rogers saying, “It isn’t what you don’t know that will hurt you, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”

We have a lot of people to thank, first and foremost our readers, including our many overseas readers (India tops that list). Some fellow bloggers were kind enough to take notice of us early on (in the beginning, you feel like you’ve set up a soapbox in the corner of a park and no one is listening to your oration), particularly Michael Panzner, David Iverson, RGE Monitor, and the team at FTAlphaville. Mark Thoma has been very generous with advice and encouragement. Felix Salmon not only took interest, but asked us to guest blog at Portfolio.com. Cactus at Angry Bear and Tanta at Calculated Risk have become regular correspondents. And of course, Ed Wright, who prodded me to start blogging in the first place and has patiently been refining the site’s look and ad strategy, and Doug Smith (a professional colleague; no relation) who gave a lot of feedback on the blog in its early months. If I have missed anyone, please forgive the oversight.

We plan continuing site tweaks in the upcoming months, and hopefully a more serious redesign. Some readers have been kind enough to ask about a tip jar; that’s something we may implement.

If you’d like to help make this a better blog:

Comment. We’ve had some high-caliber discussions (many readers are impressively well versed in economic and market lore). Join the fray!

Pass along feature, layout, and advertising suggestions. Interesting research, news stories that are breaking or haven’t been well covered, observations about where the media (or yours truly) has gotten something wrong or been incomplete, commentary and analysis are all grist for posts. Please don’t take umbrage if I don’t make use of a tidbit you’ve sent along. Sometimes, due to the fact that I post in the evenings and early a.m., by the time I see a post lead, it has been so well covered elsewhere that I have little to add. If you highlight something interesting, either via a post comment or e-mail, rest assured I do see it. And I apologize if I’ve ever failed to reply.

Recommend us for interviews. Morgan Brown interviewed us at Blown Mortgage; we’re game for more.

Take interest in our ads. I tend to read past online ads of any sort, but (maybe when your reading gets interrupted by a call) have a look now and again.