In the recent hubbub over issues great and small, one milestone almost slipped by unnoticed: Epolitics.com launched just over five years ago, with an inaugural post published July 17, 2006. At that point, the site’s main store of content was the original incarnation of Online Politics 101 (in individual chapters, not yet in PDF form), but the first really substantive blog post followed soon thereafter. And remarkably enough, it’s a piece still relevant to discussions of the political and media landscape today, a fate I wish were true for everything written here.
Since then, my life has gone through plenty of changes — all or part of stints at three jobs, a run at self-employment (and resulting near-collapse financially), a lovely girlfriend here and there, the loss of two long-term pets occasionally featured in these pages, plus a hell of a lot of good times all around. But despite occasional gaps in the publishing record, E.pol has survived and thrived, and led to opportunities I hadn’t dreamt of before. Plus, it’s played host to a legion of up-and-coming thinkers in the online politics space. All of this was in an arena in which many, many websites burned briefly and then faded out, a fact that Google Reader makes very clear every time I log in — my feed list features digital-politics ghost site after ghost site, most barely remembered if at all.
For Epolitics.com, let’s let the numbers speak for themselves:
| Current Number of Site Readers Per Weekday: | 300-500 |
| Number of RSS subscribers: | ~1300 |
| Number of E-Books Published: | 3 |
| Copies of E-Books Directly Downloaded from this site: | 75,000+ |
| Number of Daily Articles Published (including this one): | 1335 |
| Number of Guest Authors: | 25 |
| Number of Comments Left by Thoughtful Readers: | 1912 |
| Number of Spam Comments Submitted by Evil Robots: | 1,026,926 |
| Number of Industry Awards Won: | 1 (Golden Dot) |
| Number of Articles Published that Gratuitously Reference Zombies, Robots or Pornography: | [Our numbering system remains inadequate to meet the challenge] |
| Panel Discussions/Speaking Gigs/Media Quotes to which this Site has Led: | 100+ |
| Number of “Dates” on which I’ve Been “Asked” because of this Site: | I ain’t tellin’ |
| Amount of Fun I’ve Had Writing for this Site: | Incalculable |
What’s next for us? With another election year on the way, it’s time for a “Winning in 2012” follow-on to the 2010 book, for a start, along with plenty of drive-by potshots at candidates, campaigns and advocacy groups in the blog pages. And, let’s hope for more guest posts and more guest authors, ’cause y’all all might just get sick of listening to one dude over and over. And to everyone who reads the site, THANK YOU! It would have dried up and blown away long ago without you.
Five years? See Mom, I CAN commit to something…every now and then.
– cpd