IIRC it's been around since 97.

I have also noticed that blogging is definitely becoming more mainstream.

A function, I think, of the sheer volume/momentum of the thing.

I have also noticed that blogging is definitely becoming more mainstream. Over the course of the last few months, quite a few members of my immediate and extended family have started their own blogs, and quite a few of them continue to update their blogs on a regular basis. With an RSS reader to watch for new posts, this provides a good way to keep up with people and find out what they have going on. Even my Mom has begun blogging now, and if she's doing it, I'd say it's gone pretty mainstream.

-My first website (1996-1998): At the time I was writing a weekly "column" on the Internet that consisted largely of technology and computer stuff. All of the pages were created manually in Notepad, but in many ways this site was a proto-Blog. The site actually got plugged briefly a couple of times in print magazines, but Eventually it just got to be too much of a pain to maintain and fell by the wayside. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine preserved the whole thing though, egregious typos and all. In the time that I actively maintained the site, I don't think it got much past 10,000 hits total in two years.

-Second attempt: A blog on Blogspot, started shortly before Google bought them. This one lasted for about a year of infrequent posting before I lost interest. The tools were definitely an improvement but a lack of subjects to write about and the difficulty of dealing with Blogger at the time led to that one being abandoned as well.

-Current Blog: Started about a year ago on wordpress.com, and has already exceeded both of the other site's total hit counts by a significant margin. Even though Wordpress still has its warts and its limitations (which I could probably work around if I decided to self-host my Blog,) it is so much easier to deal with, provides useful stat tracking, and just makes things a lot easier to deal with.

My site consists mostly of me commenting on random things I come across in my day-to-day wanderings, but I have also been working on a number of research projects on local history (particularly in retail and commerce) as well, which is a subject that seems to have a lot more interest to people than I expected it to. To some extent, I have patterned my site's content a bit after James Lileks' buzz.mn site (where I am a regular reader and commenter) but on a much smaller scale. The one decision that I've made is to try to avoid politics on my Blog, because even though it would probably result in more traffic overall, it just seems to be more trouble than it's worth overall.

For the time being, I've enjoyed working on this one, but there are times when the pesky need to hold down a day job have made it difficult to Blog as much as I'd like to.

I've got some more thoughts on the subject, which I might post later, but I need to be somewhere.

While there are more thoughtful, moderate tone blogs now than ever, the trend has been toward harsh polemics. Many of the top political bloggers have come on to the scene since I started and almost all who have risen to the top have been more Ann Coulter or Michael Moore than George Will or David Broder.

Spittle sells. Our own center-right group blog has had steady readership and we're constantly told how much people appreciate thoughtful quality posts and serious informed analysis and the consistently civil tone, but the stats tell the tale--ranting pulls more traffic than reason, and internally in the blog partisan-slanted posts garner more views than any in-depth reportage of issues and facts.

I've seen a lot of things come, go, and change. Daily Pundit displayed the first BlogAd, for instance. And a bit of late-night musing on New Year's Eve at DP in 2001 resulted in the popularization of the term "blogosphere" itself.

The (some might call it) savagery of my analytical approach - and the rhetoric with which I deploy it - has precluded any sane politicos or journalism venues from paying for my services - which has been okay with me. I don't think I am particularly "pure," in either a political or an ideological, sense, and I doubt my eclectic approach would suit well to a homogeneous message, or even a particular tone.

I have added a few fellow bloggers to DP over the past couple of years, but I don't really feel that the workload has thereby become any smaller. I still put up 90% of all posts, and contribute most of the comments from the editors.

I do agree that a much greater portion of my readership accesses Daily Pundit content via feeds. It's difficult for me to actually quantify that, even with Feedburner, and so I no longer have any real idea how much readership the blog actually has. More than at the beginning - considerably so - is about as close as I can get it.

As for the future, my biggest worry today is the imposition of some sort of speech or campaign controls on the blogosphere. Neither Obama nor McCain has any reason to like (different) parts of the blogosphere, and particularly on the left, the game has always been to encourage liberal expression, and proscribe conservative expression. As for McCain, we already know what he thinks of the First Amendment, and I wouldn't trust him any further than I can spit on the issue of freedom of speech for blogs.

I'm interested to see what will happen to the political blogosphere after November, especially the "progressive" blogosphere. If Obama wins, what will they have to bitch about? If Obama looses, that would constitute the ultimate failure on their part to shape politics in their image.

I'm not convinced much of anything will happen, save for a slight shift in tone. Limbaugh used to get asked questions about the future of his show, given the same electoral conditions..(going in the opposite way, of course) and his audience has held rather steady through the years. I don't see the 'sphere changing all that much thereby.

James:

It should be noted that only a relative handful of the millions of blogs out there are making serious income.

No particular quibble, here, just using this as the springboard. I've been at it for somewhat longer than you, and personally, I'm not making piles of cash, though I am making more than enough to keep my ISP and my webserver hosts' bills covered with perhaps enough left over to buy myself lunch, so I'm content. As a result of that modest income, it's a hobby that doesn't cost me all that much, that I'd not be spending anyway.

I wonder, though about the point of optimizing content for added dollars. Personally, I've been working on that from the standpoint of bringing in additional people. Everyone, even if they're not about making money, tries to make their site the biggest success if can be. The dollars are a secondary concern, if that. They do go hand in hand, though, so again, I have no major quibble with your point.

Now, most regular readers are keeping up with blogs through some sort of feed reader and clicking in to the site itself only to participate in the comments section discussion or (in the case of partial feeds) to finish reading entries that interest them.

I find about 25% of my traffic coming in for single hits from such sources.

A more recent phenomenon is the rise of “splogs,” auto-generated blogs that are created by stealing material off of RSS feeds for popular blogs. The splogs make money from unearned page impressions generated by search engines, drawing traffic and money away from sites that actually created the content. Even worse, the splogs often wind up ranked higher in the search engines than the original sites, since the splogs tend to micro-focus on a handful of keywords, and the original sites actually get penalized in the rankings because of “duplicate content.”

A real problem, this. I recently, as you, added a copyright notice to my RSS feeds to clamp down on that kind of nonsense. Trouble was, that feeds I'd signed on for...(Blogburst, for example) had some problems running those feeds with the copyrights in them, and that was costing me serious traffic. (One blogburst in the Chicago Sun-Times... a place I appear with some regularity... generated several thousand hits for me a few weeks ago)
I ended up removing the copyright notice. I don't really know what can be done, with this problem.

Just about every presidential, congressional, or gubernatorial candidate now has an effort to court bloggers for favorable coverage.

I do get a lot of that kind of thing in my feedback bin. So far, I've been mostly ignoring it. You state yourself, my exact reason for ignoring most of them:

Bloggers who work briefly for a campaign, especially for a controversial candidate, tend to be forever tarred with that association and readers naturally wonder whether they’re getting unvarnished views.

I've seen it happen with Henke, for example. He's still catching hell for work he did years ago. It comes, at the end, down to long term credibility.

While there are more thoughtful, moderate tone blogs now than ever, the trend has been toward harsh polemics. Many of the top political bloggers have come on to the scene since I started and almost all who have risen to the top have been more Ann Coulter or Michael Moore than George Will or David Broder.

This is reflective, not a driver, of what's already out there, James. People are beginning to understand, possibly for the first time in decades, that, as a friend says, ideas have real consequences in real lives, particularly when set out as policy. This is not a matter of intellectual gamesmanship, this is not the Harvard debate society... These things affect real people. This increase in anger is a reflection of the anger already out there, and is why often the ones who shout louder get more traffic.

For the record, I was only asking for a sentence or two quote for my post, but thanks! Great piece. :-p