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Happy Birthday!!!!

I just remembered. I started what has now become The WGOM five years ago today!

This entry was posted by SBG on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 9:28 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. It is one of 3041 entries by the author. We are no longer accepting Letters to the Editor on this post.

33 LTEs so far

  • Algonad
    July 17th, 2009 at 9:50 am

    Happy birthday!

    We should all go to Friday's for lunch today. I love it when they sing happy birthday there!!

  • AMR
    July 17th, 2009 at 9:53 am

    "You're the Birthday, You're the Birthday, You're the Birthday Boy Or Girl"
    Or website. Happy birthday to the WGOM!

  • brianS
    July 17th, 2009 at 11:10 am

    Will the WGOM start kindergarten this fall, or are you gonna home-school?

  • Jeff A
    July 17th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    Happy birthday! This is such a wonderful site. Thanks, SBG.

  • Beau
    July 17th, 2009 at 11:56 am

    Con-grat-u-lay-shuns!

  • UncleWalt
    July 17th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

    Happy birthday to the WGOM, Boss.

  • ubelmann
    July 17th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

    5 years seems pretty impressive for a blog. What percentile do you suppose the WGOM falls in for blongevity?

    • SBG
      July 17th, 2009 at 1:45 pm

      Well, I would say that it's absolutely in the 95th percentile. Most blogs die in the first month. Very few last to a year. A lot of the famous ones, of course, last a long time. Of course, in the Twins blogosphere, there are two monsters Aaron and Seth, that were around when I started and are still around. Twins Geek hasn't been continuous and he's been around different spots. I don't know of any other Twins blogs that have been around as long as this one.

      • ubelmann
        July 17th, 2009 at 1:48 pm

        Yeah, considering how many blogs die after a week or so, you're probably more like the 99th percentile. It seems like it's easy to get a skewed perception of the typical blog lifespan since the ones that are most often visited are (naturally) the ones that have been around for a while.

        • SBG
          July 17th, 2009 at 1:55 pm

          Okay, here's some information on the topic (from September 2008):

          Several studies indicate that most blogs are abandoned soon after creation (with 60% to 80% abandoned within one month, depending on whose figures you choose to believe) and that few are regularly updated.

          The 'average blog' thus has the lifespan of a fruitfly. One cruel reader of this page commented that the average blog also has the intelligence of a fly.

          The Perseus report noted above indicates that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, "representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned".

          Jeffrey Henning of Perseus sniffed that

          Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days.

          Perseus claimed that the average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days, with some 132,000 blogs being abandoned after a year or more. The oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days.

          So, at the time of the article, fully 2/3 of all blogs ever created were abandoned. The longest running of those was 923 days, which is less than three years. The average length of those that survived more than a day was 126 days, or four months. Bottom line, if you look at the entire universe of blogs, this one has been a long runner, easily in the 95th percentile.

  • Big Mak
    July 17th, 2009 at 1:43 pm

    Happy Birthday WGOM! Here's to many more.

  • Aaron Gleeman
    July 17th, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    Congrats, SBG!

    As for blog lifespans, I would bet quite a bit that you're in the 99th percentile. Hell, you're probably in the 95th percentile even among Twins blogs. Our little group has had a ton of long-running sites for whatever reason, but there are still dozens that never made it past a couple months. Expand that to the entire blogging world and my guess is that you're probably more like 99.9th percentile.

    Anyway, I just wanted to say congrats. This site has always had my favorite comments section, much to my site's chagrin (and despite a few of you guys turning on me recently!). Keep up the good work. One day maybe I'll get a life and you'll move up one spot on the tenure list.

  • Moss
    July 17th, 2009 at 2:55 pm

    Boss, you should be proud of this labor of love! Who ever thought that procrastination could ever bear such fruit?

  • Rhubarb_Runner
    July 17th, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    not sure where blog comment section is, but Happy Birthday, WGOM

  • twayn
    July 17th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

    Congratulations on your first lustrum, SBG!