It's the last day of June, and I didn't want to let the month go by without recognizing that June marked OC Blog's two year anniversary.
OC Blog debuted on June 17, 2004, with a readership of zero (not including me). The OC Blogpen consisted of yours truly and the blog was ugly and hosted on Blog City. My intention from the beginning was for OC Blog to become a group effort, and I migrated it over to TypePad in November 2004 and began recruiting other members of the Blogpen: Roscoe, OC Dutch, Lurk, Publius, Pistolero, Kahuna, Silence Dogood -- and most recently OC Spock and Roark (I know, I know -- I still need to add them to the Blogpen graphic).
I started OC Blog to fill what I saw as a void in political news. Political coverage in the OC Register and LA Times was shrinking, and I believed there was a demand for the kind of political information that MSM editors would dismiss as too "inside baseball" for the general audience -- an as such, never got report.
OC Blog was an experiment, and it worked better than I imagined. Some figures to illustrate the growth of OC Blog and underscore the existence of a genuine demand among opinion leaders, activists, and interested citizens for "inside baseball" political news. Since November 2004, OC Blog has received 823,331 page views and is currently averaging 90,000 - 100,000 page views per month (I use November 2004 as a starting point because Blog-City didn't provide blog traffic information).
During the same period, the Blogpen has posted 2,883 posts and our readers have responded with 20,571 comments (a special award goes to Tim Whitacre, who single-handedly posted .1% of those comments).
I'd like to thank my fellow Blogpen members for providing news and commentary that would otherwise be missing from the Orange County political scene. I wouldn't have been able to keep OC Blog going -- and a special gracias to Lurk for handling the News Roundup chores on the weekend. It is a great help and I appreciate it.
Equal thanks go to our readers for making OC Blog Orange County's leading clearing-house for political information and for providing the vast river of comments that a major factor in OC Blog's popularity.
When OC Blog launched two years ago, there was literally no political OC Blogosphere. Art Pedroza's Orange Juice had published intermittently, but hadn't been active for months by the time OC Blog went live. But I would like to thank Art for providing some of the inspiration for launching this effort, and I'm glad he revived O-Juice into a thriving political blog. In the last year Power Blue Report, Tin Star, Orange Punch, A Clockwork Orange, Total Buzz, The Blotter, Frank Ury's Mission Viejo Blog, the Greater Orange eBlog, The Liberal OC and Greetings From Downtown Huntington Beach have entered the political OC Blogosphere (my apologies to any I have overlooked).
Our motto here at OC Blog regarding the OC Blogosphere has always been the more the merrier. We view other Orange County blogs not as competition but as collaborators in getting political information into the public domain. A rising tide of public interest lifts all blogs, after all - and I believe our collective efforts enrich public discourse in Orange County.
In any case, I look forward to OC Blog's continued growth and to bringing you our insights into and views on Orange County politics.
Muchas gracias!