SiliconBeat’s one-year anniversary, and a request

SiliconBeat celebrates its one-year anniversary today.

We thank everyone who has joined us for the ride. More than 10,000 people now come to this site daily. We’d also like to request your feedback.

We opened up the site on Oct 28, 2004. We’d actually started blogging secretly, in test mode — many weeks before, on Sept 8, coincidentally the same day that Dan Rather aired his 60 Minutes story about lapses in the president’s military record. Bloggers tore apart the report’s claims. That controversy marked the rise of blogs as a major social force.

So we are an example of the earliest wave of…

the mainstream journalist blogging phenom. It has been a tricky ride at times, as this WSJ article a couple of months ago suggests, but it has been well worth it for us — and we hope it has served you well too.

Mainly, we’d like to hear your suggestions for how we can make the site better. So far, it has been just Mike, Matt and the chickens. No pros. Doing it mainly on our own time — on the side of our regular Merc jobs. Sure, we could spiff up the site a bit. But we’re asking mainly about content. What do you like? What do you not like? Feel free to drop us an email, or add a comment.

Finally, a suggestion. We think you should subscribe via RSS. The reason for this is because we make many updates. If you simply visit the site, you may miss when updates/corrections/clarifications are made on previous posts. If you subscribe via RSS, the updated posts show up again in your RSS inbox, with clear markings as to how the piece has been updated. Corrections are a key part of this business, and a way we can foster trust with readers who may find something wrong and let us know we screwed up.

Thanks for reading!

Matt & Mike