This week will mark the one year anniversary of this domain. Which date you want to pick to mark the occasion depends - the domain was created on July 17, the first blog post was made on July 19, and the official announcement of the cutover from Blogspot was July 20 - so I'm just going to start celebrating today and finish up at the end of the week (I'll be out of town this weekend).

Blogging has been a remarkably social activity for me, all things considered. I've gotten comments and emails from high school and college classmates who've found me online (FHC, Patrick, William, and Andrew, to name four), and I've met a reader or two at some of the political events I've attended lately. (This is one reason why I'd like to see the various political and grassroots organizations around here start blogs - I think it could help establish a connection with their supporters and colleagues. I'll have more on this idea in a later posting.) A number of my non-blogging friends are regular readers, and I know at least some members of my family come by. A lot of the satisfaction that I get out of this stems from that.

A lot of friends and (so far) one member of my family have started their own blogs. People I knew in real life before they got into blogging include:

Larry Simon
Binkley
Greg Morrow
Karin Kross
Michael Croft
Ginger Stampley
Amy Hemphill
Pete Von Der Haar
Chuck Ivy
Mike Tremoulet
Emilie Metzger
Erica Bess Duncan
Danil Suits
David Raitt
Tom Spencer
Bobby Nagle
Rick Jones
Craig Biggerstaff

I've also had the pleasure of meeting a number of local bloggers and a handful of nonlocal bloggers. I actually have a fairly long history of getting to know folks online before meeting them in real life, though in the past it's primarily been via mailing lists that I'm on. My parents still get a laugh out of my 30th birthday party, which was held at my house, where they spoke to an attendee who had come via an invitation sent to the list and was meeting me for the first time. Some of the cool people I've met as a direct result of blogging are:

Alex Whitlock
Rob Humenik
Kevin Whited
Callie
Ted Barlow
Jack Cluth
Andrew Northrup
Claudia
Brian Linse
Christine Selleck
Kevin Drum
Elaine Mesker-Garcia
Ann Salisbury
Katie Stahl
EJ
David Bigwood
Hanna
Sydney
Matt Mullenweg
Kymberlie McGuire
Kathy Ratliff
Raegen Ward

I've probably forgotten someone, and if so I apologize for the omission. That's a lot of people - more than I'd thought when I started to catalog them. How many people have other bloggers met as a result of blogging?

Next up on my Domain Anniversary Celebration List: The effect blogging has had on me.