Ionarts Turns 6: State of the Blog

The improbable adventure of Ionarts began six years ago today. I thank all of the people, especially Jens Laurson, Mark Barry, Michael Lodico, and Todd Babcock, who have put in a lot of time and work, without any real remuneration, to make Ionarts what it is. We also thank all of you who read, comment, link to us, and have helped put Ionarts on the map. Keep telling people you know about Ionarts: sign up for the weekly newsletter and forward it to your friends.

For the record, over the course of the past six years we have published 3,880 posts, including this one, and received over 1.7 million visitors from all around the world. Just in the last 24 hours, people have read this site in Seattle, Provo, San Francisco, Wichita, Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, Albany, and Montreal; in Rio de Janeiro, Caracas, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Santiago; in Leeds, Magdeburg, Paris, Brussels, Skellefteå, Utrecht, Rome, Valencia, and Lisbon; in Hong Kong, Chennai, Seoul, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Dubai, Brisbane, and Wellington. In our sixth year, we have published 571 posts from Santa Fe, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Baltimore, New York, Beijing, Rome, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and of course Washington, D.C. We have gone on to publishing cultural pieces in mainstream publications, including the Washington Post, Opernwelt, Playbill Arts, and Musical America, and we have seen more print journalists try their hand at blogging. We have reviewed opera, orchestras, chamber music, jazz, recordings, DVDs, art, movies, and dance, and we have linked to odd tidbits of cultural reporting, by ourselves and others around the world.

In short, the state of the blog is good, very good, and we continue to gain ground in all of those things bloggers care about. Ionarts has continued this year as one of the Top 10 Classical Music Blogs, according to some rankings of such things:

• Overall, #5 (Invesp Consulting)
  
• Google Links, #7 (Scott Spiegelberg)

Who knows where this is all going, but for now we are content to sit back and enjoy the ride.

UPDATE:
Well, it took the better part of a day, but Mrs. Ionarts has finally agreed to put her widow's black back in the closet and allow me to continue Ionarts for another year. In all seriousness, none of what I do here could happen without her support and love. And indulgence, miles and miles of indulgence of my least whims. Gros bisous, ma biche!