It’s My Blogiversary!

Today marks the first anniversary of me creating my first weblog. I don’t know what took me so long to start a weblog in the first place. I’d been hearing about weblogs for some time, but never really looked into them. It wasn’t until I took a break from trading, while waiting for the Iraq invasion to play out, that I really learned what blogs were all about. The publicity from all the war bloggers had a lot to do with that. I had no idea what I wanted to blog about, but I really liked the idea of being able to easily publish content to the web. It hit me very quickly that I could post information about stock trading and markets. So TraderMike.net was born. As it turned out, I started posting all kinds of non-markets related content — in fact, the ‘extraneous’ stuff was the majority of my posts. I really wanted my market commentary to be separate so I started ‘Move the Crowd’ to hold all that other stuff.

Even though blogging has been a chore at times, I’ve enjoyed this year and I’m very glad that I got into blogging. This week, with the death of my good friend, I got a new appreciation for just how powerful and useful a weblog can be. What began as me just spewing out a few words about my lost friend turned into a forum for many of his friends to share their grief and get news about the situation. So if for no other reason than that it’s all been worth it.

I look forward to the next years of blogging. I’ve got several features that I want to implement and I really need to give all of my blogs a face lift. Thanks to all you you who have stopped by, and especially those of you who have blogrolled me. One unexpected benefit of blogging has been all my new virtual friends. Hopefully we’ll get to meet in person in the near future.

I wanted to do a grandiose post for this anniversary, with a recaps of some of my most popular & favorite entries, but I’ve got too much going on right now for me to do that. So instead I’ll just list some stats:

Trader Mike – 25,100 visits since April 8, 2003. 410 entries. 381 comments.
Move the Crowd – 98,0000 visits since June 27, 2003. This will be entry #298. 557 comments.
Mike’s QuickLinks – 2,100 visits, 339 entries, 50 comments.