Bankruptcy

We're Three Years Old!

By Bob Lawless

Today is the third anniversary of the launch of Credit Slips. Happy Birthday to us! (And, Happy Birthday to my daughter who turns 10 tomorrow.)

Sitemeter says that we have had 783,463 visits during that time (which doesn't count people who read us through a news aggregator like Google Reader). Maybe the 1,000,000th visitor ought to get a prize -- something like a free subscription to our RSS feed. The average visitor stays on our web site for 1 minute and 11 seconds, which at first seemed a disappointingly low amount of time. I am told, however, that by Internet standards it is pretty good and an indication that visitors actually are reading the content on the site. We should all shudder for the future when 1:11 is considered a long attention span.

In the past year, we had a breakthrough with the first time (to my knowledge) that Credit Slips was cited in a court opinion. In approving the sale of General Motors's assets, the judge cited to several of Stephen Lubben's posts. Lubben was a new regular blogger this year, and his insightful posts on Chrysler, GM, and other corporate bankruptcies principally raised the question of why we were not smart enough to have him on board from the start.

It is very rewarding to get a call from a government policymaker or from someone in the media who starts with "I was reading Credit Slips and . . . ." Just yesterday, a local business owner told me he had changed some of his practices because of information on our blog. We started the blog to share our views about credit and bankruptcy policy, and it is wondrous (at least to me) that anyone pays any attention to what I have to say. As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the things that really makes Credit Slips work is our readers. The comments on the blog come from experts who add new insights to what is already in the blog and call us out where they disagree. The debates always remain professional and add to the blog's goals. Thanks to our readers and commenters, thanks to our guest bloggers, and thanks to our regular bloggers for making Credit Slips work so well.

(Thanks to soapylovedeb for the photo, CC BY 2.0)

Full post as published by Credit Slips on July 24, 2009 (boomark / email).