C@W - 20th anniversary!

Well.  Hard to believe, but this blog has been going for 20 years.  Check the listings in the sidebar – there it all is.  5,431 posts – and 72,878 comments[1].  As noted a while back, nowadays we get more hits than ever, which I ascribe to a long and persistent tail following the massive AI “training” blitz of last year that saw us getting truly astronomical daily numbers for a couple of months.  But we were hardly alone in experiencing that.  (What impact our mighty back-catalogue of accurate reporting, partisan posturing and perfect English prose has had on the collective AI intellect, I cannot imagine.)

So: what to say now?  Take a look back at the 10th anniversary ruminations, which noted a bit of the original history and 2006 context – with more nostalgic stuff from many of our first decade of readership, in the 31 comments below the post.  You’ll find many notes on, and contributions from, some of the great bloggers of yesteryear.  Is Guido really the only other current blog still wholly recognisable from 20 years ago?

In the overall context of today’s wildly hyper-financialised, hyper-ventilating politico-social media space, the ‘conventional’ blogosphere is incredibly sedate and, it must be acknowledged, heavily dated.  How many folks nowadays have the attention-span for even a ‘medium read’, never mind a long read?  Well, you guys do: and there is a world of thoughtful long-reads – it’s Substack.  But I’ve never really felt I had the time to make a proper go of that – an order of magnitude more demanding, I’m guessing, than what’s needed to ‘curate’ a leisurely blog like C@W. 

I suppose in terms of outright www presence, the C@W highlight must be when we were getting so many links and hits via the FT (‘Alphaville‘) and, most impressively, from Robert Peston’s blog – which was for a while one of the very biggest UK news blogs, indeed possibly the biggest[2] – that the BBC actually installed some kind of filter and banned any cross-blog linking from Pesto.  Amazing to relate, but true. 

Guido himself tried to persuade CU and me to join his empire as the business rumour-mongering arm of Order-Order.  We turned him down, for this reason.  He gets away with blue murder because he is slagging off politicians: but that’s a free hit – they almost never sue.  Try doing that with the corporate community and you’d have Carter Ruck down on you in a nanosecond.  He had to admit, that thought hadn’t occurred to him.

Around here, the big change latterly is of course that the great CityUnslicker himself has moved on to other things, and Bill Quango MP is now just an occasional, if always exceedingly welcome, visitor.  Your truly found himself the last man standing a while back, and the flickering flame has never quite gone out – thanks to the many readers that, over those two decades, have adorned the BTL acres with great commentary and wit.

I find it hard to guess what will happen over the next several years.  There will continue to be plenty of events’ dear boy, events; and I don’t see myself becoming any the less opinionated.  But nothing lasts forever.

Anyhow – I think we’re all set for the foreseeable future.  If you’re up for it, I am too.  Till the annual predictions round-up, at any rate!  Cheers to you all - 

ND

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[1] The google stats say there have been over 15m site visits but that’s an underestimation, since that particular record doesn’t go back the whole way, for some reason.  The comments data need to be taken with a pinch of salt, too, because old posts can attract advertising bots posting BTL (often ‘commenting’ in Chinese or Arabic), and the task of cleaning it all up is beyond what’s even vaguely sensible to contemplate. 

[2] Michael Crick’s was the other.