Is that in blog years or dog years?

This article was originally printed in Numismatic News.
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I have been writing an online blog called “Buzz” every business day since April 24, 2007. When you read this I will have posted my 1,000th commentary somewhere on or about March 3. I can’t know for sure until I reach the milestone. Some days I post more than once.

Those of you who do not have access to the Numismatic News website at www.numismaticnews.com, can see what my blog is like by reading the “best of buzz,” which takes one of the weekly blogs and highlights it on the same page as the responses to the Numismatic News weekly online poll question.

Topics basically are dictated by what is going on in the hobby and what I am personally observing on any given day. It might be about a subject raised by someone who telephoned just prior to my writing it, or who wrote me a letter. Yes, I still get mail and I still avidly read it. I’ll take a good idea from any source and run with it as far as I can.

To say writing my blog is a learning experience is probably an understatement. I learn every day. But then it is not like going to school, either.

The Internet operates by different rules and those rules keep changing. But the idea of telling an interesting story is something that never changes. The Internet seems to want things as current as this minute, yet experience does count for something in telling a story. Finding the right blend of old and new is always a challenge.

Naturally, some blog topics work because readers are suddenly interested in them and they are hot subjects for online search engines. Last year’s congressional hearing where a Goldline representative testified proved to be one of those hot topics. The blog I posted just before going home to celebrate Thanksgiving in 2010 also proved popular because I happened to have a tidbit of news that nobody else had posted before they went home for the holiday.

But events that generate massive sudden interest are more in the nature of lightning strikes. They light up the sky briefly and then it is back to the daily routine. Loyal blog readers who routinely check to see what I am thinking or doing on a daily basis are those who make the whole thing worthwhile and I am grateful to them. I hope you are one of them, or will become one of them. Check out:

http://blog.numismaticnews.net/buzz/

I have one final point of comparison. To put the 1,000 blogs written in just under four years’ time in the proper light, you might consider that to write that many of these columns would take something over 19 years. With blogs going online at five times the pace that these weekly columns are published, it will not be long before they will outnumber these columns and the predecessor weekly editorials that I wrote for this space.

Blogs may be a new way to address the collector audience, but what interests the collector reader is still the information that will allow him or her to continue to meet collecting goals and have fun in the process of doing it.