It’s been quite a year here at the One City blog and while the nature of the internet (and the blogosphere in particular) is to worship the very latest meme, news cycle, or cute animal picture, I feel a little nostalgia and self-congratulation is in order.
If you’re a new reader, you’ll notice our slick WordPress template, our trendy blogging handles, and our brief, thoughtful posts. In the last 5 months of this year we did, on average, over 10,000 hits a month and the graph of our traffic for 2008 looks like the reverse of the S&P 500 over the same period. Good for us, bad for the Standard & Poor’s.

If you’ve been reading us since we launched in November 2007, you’ll know this has not always been the case. When we started I felt a nervous, collective need to Do Real Good amongst the Interdependence Project regulars who were suddenly putting their writing up for scrutiny. My first post was an unwieldy three pages long – by blog standards that’s up there with technical manuals.
We have gotten punchier – and with more bloggers, more regular – but I don’t think the quality or thoughtfulness of One City has suffered. I’m consistently surprised by the willingness of my fellow scribblers to ask searching questions and try to answer them with scholarship or a genuinely personal story. I’m also mightily impressed by the seriousness with which our readers comment on our posts, generating a level of exchange not often found on other blogs (I’m looking at you, TMZ).
Seriously guys, if you’ve spent as much time trolling the darklands of the internet as me, you know we have something special here.
I encourage new readers to poke around our more ancient work – there’s gold in the muck – and spread the word. And to my fellow One City writers, thank you for a year of great blogging.