What An Odyssey

That title seemed appropriate, considering that this is the 2001st blog post written on The Liberty Papers. In a way it is also appropriate that I am the one who is writing it.

For those who don’t know me, I’m Eric, the guy who thought it would be pretty cool to create this blog 2 years ago. I would venture to guess that a lot of you that will read this post don’t actually know me. I haven’t actively blogged since May, 2006 when I stopped writing publicly.

In the intervening 18 months (my goodness, it’s been that long already??) I’ve been quite successful in my new position. I’ve even had the opportunity to write and be published in commercial publications, although the writing is all related to my profession rather than politics. You can get an idea of what I’ve been up to with a quick Google search, if you’re interested.

Okay, enough about me. Why the heck am I writing this post if I no longer actively blog? Simple, really. Two years ago today I wrote the first post on The Liberty Papers. When I mentioned that to Brad and the other contributors, and suggested someone write a post about that, Brad asked if I would write it. After giving it some thought, I decided I could.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s something to commemorate two years of The Liberty Papers.

We’ve written 2,000 posts, had over 16,000 comments and more than 650,000 unique visitors in the past 24 months. Our visitors come from all over the world. In the past we’ve had folks visit from China, Saudi Arabia and Iran, among other countries that are not exactly friends of liberty and free speech. Our readers and commenters range from the anonymous to such famous folks as David Friedman and David Duke*. We’ve been linked by any number of famous bloggers, including Glenn Reynolds, Lew Rockwell’s blog and many more than I have time to track down right this second.

Now, that hardly seemed likely during the first few months that this blog existed. The original group of contributors and I had much grander ambitions than we were actually living up to at the time. My personal blog, Eric’s Grumbles Before The Grave, was performing much better than TLP was. Most of the site’s traffic was being driven here by Brad, Doug, Chris and I. We were barely getting 2,000 visitors a month and the comments and external links were few and far between. So, how did we go from there to here? A lot of hard work, to be honest. We write, on average, 3 posts a day. We read, comment and link to other blogs and pay attention to topics that matter to our audience. And that has paid off dramatically.

Today this blog is one of the top listings on Google News for Ron Paul and sometimes Rudy Guliani. It is linked by hundreds of blogs worldwide and draws thousands of readers every day. Discussions in the comment sections often run into hundreds of comments and the range of thought, debate and discussion is very broad.

The range of the contributors is broad as well. From anarchist to limited government, practically all of the ideas that fit within the big tent of libertarianism (the political philosophy, not the political party) are represented here. This blog definitely lives up to what I hoped it might become. And I hope it provides a place for dynamic, dramatic and lively discourse on freedom and liberty for many visitors and participants for many years to come.

Thank you Adam, Brad, Chris, Doug, Jason, Kevin, Mike, Nick, Robert, Simon, Stephen, Tarran and UCrawford for all the work you do to keep this place alive and well. A bit of thanks to them is definitely in order, not one of them receives any compensation other than personal gratification for their work on this blog. Thank you to the many thousands of people who have stopped by and left a comment (or more than one). I can’t wait to write another self-congratulatory post 2 years from now! I can hardly wait.

* Update on 11/23/07. Just to clarify, based on an erroneous conclusion by a commenter, I am not proud to associate with David Duke at all. I do think it highlights the reach and scope of this blog that someone like David Duke will come and comment here. That’s not the same as being proud to associate with him. I would prefer not to have anything to do with him at all.

Security executive, work for Core Security, veteran, kids, dogs, cat, chickens, mortgage, bills. I like #liberty #InfoSec #scotch, #wine, #cigars, #travel, #baseball