I published my first blog post on January 8, 2003. Sunday will therefore mark my eighth full year of blogging. Today’s post is number 1,967. That’s equivalent to five posts per week for forty-nine weeks each year. I never post on weekends, so the actual blogaversary will pass in silence.

The medium has changed somewhat. In the early years, the only responses were emails, comments posted on my actual site (www.peterlevine.ws/mt), and other people’s blog posts that referred to mine. Locating such responses required ego-surfing, with search engines like Technorati.

Now my posts go forth in several ways: on my site, on my Facebook page, via Twitter, and via RSS feed. I also publish my more ambitious entries that have political themes on Huffington Post, where the number of comments is much higher. Facebook draws the most frequent and most civil and helpful comments. Twitter and RSS reach relevant audiences.

Fewer peers’ blogs now refer to mine, and I think that may be because fewer people are operating their own free-standing blogs. A higher proportion of the dialogue now is quasi-private–Facebook friends posting comments on my personal page–rather than blogs as an imitation of a “public sphere.”

I like Facebook, but I will hold onto my personal site because I want to control the archive of more than 1,900 entries. The vast majority of people who read anything on my blog are reading old entries that they find with Google searches. “Black dentists,” “Nabokov heroine,” and “Was Velazquez left-handed? are some frequent queries that land people on my site. (He was.)

Meanwhile, I think my content has been pretty consistent: the same mix of youth civic engagement, general politics from a “civic” angle, and bits of philosophy and literature. I generally try not to be self-referential, but the annual blogaversary is an excuse for summing up.