Six Years of Blogging

I published my first post on A DC Birding Blog six years ago today, June 18, 2005. Since then, I have kept it going on a regular basis, and on a daily basis for the last few years. I originally conceived the blog as a journal for my birding walks in Washington, DC. That is more or less what it was for the first two years. Then, in summer 2007, I moved to New Jersey. The locations of the birding walks changed, and I also began adding more content about insects as my interests shifted to butterflies, dragonflies, and finally moths. News about birds and the environment has been a mainstay of the blog almost since its beginning. The weekly "Loose Feathers" series, which gathers bird and environmental news from the preceding week, debuted in November 2005.

Since I started blogging, the blogosphere has changed quite a bit and its imminent death has been predicted several times. A lot of the blogs I enjoyed in my first year of blogging are now gone. When I started blogging, there was no Twitter, and Facebook was still restricted to college students. Bloggers found other interesting blogs through toplists and blog carnivals; both of those methods have since waned in favor of social media. Even I and the Bird, one of the longest-running and most popular blog carnivals, has ceased operations.

Very few of the blogs I read in 2005 are still active. Here are some that I remember reading back then:

• 10,000 Birds is still chugging along, thanks in part to its transformation into a group blog.
• Birdchick is still active.
• The House and Other Arctic Musings may have changed houses, but Clare still offers plenty of musings on the Arctic.
• Bootstrap analysis was recently revived after a period of dormancy.
• Mike's Birding and Digiscoping Blog is still running.
• The Birdchaser is still chasing birds and blogging about them.
• Snail's Tales is still researching and writing about snails.
• Woodcreeper still posts radar maps during migration.
• The Urban Dragon Hunters are still hunting urban dragonflies.
• Bird Treatment and Learning Center is still active.
• The City Birder is still birding around Brooklyn.
• GrrlScientist is still blogging, but no longer at her original blog.

I hope I did not miss anyone. There are of course many science blogs that have sustained operations since 2005 or earlier, but I am only including ones that I have been reading continuously since the early days of the blog. There are also many blogs that I read avidly that have since ceased publication or publish less frequently than they used to. Of course, the constant turnover in the blogosphere has also produced a lot of great bird blogs in the intervening years, and some of the ones I read most regularly now were started well after I started this blog.

I look forward to another year of blogging, and I hope this year is better than the last!