Today marks the second anniversary for Alan W. King’s Blog. Last year’s anniversary came and went silently. I wanted to do something different this year.

When I thought about writing an anniversary post, the idea seemed good. I would retell the story about the circumstances that led to me blogging, how the blog’s evolved since then from only having articles to including essays and even a short story. I wanted to write about the benefits of blogging, but I already wrote that and everything else in the earlier post.

Well, not everything. My benefits go beyond an invitation to speak as a panelist on cultural issues. They go beyond serving as a consultant to a journalism grad student preparing for a class presentation on communications and social media. They go beyond me having a platform for my ideas and reporting stories below the mainstream media’s radar.

While I’m grateful for those opportunities, I’m even more grateful for the film school student, foster teens, and DC public school students and libraries — all of whom benefited from the outpouring of readers moved to give their time, money and books to worthy causes. The benefits include the blogging communities I’ve found both here on WordPress and in a blogging group recently started on Facebook.

I still pinch myself when I remember a DC soul singer requesting to be profiled after reading and following this blog. Every time her songs came up shuffled on my iPod, I couldn’t help thinking, “I actually profiled this amazing artist!” And a look into the archives shows she’s not the only amazing artists I’ve had the pleasure to write about.

Additionally, the benefits of blogging are you, dear readers — some strangers, friends and family members. Thanks to the people I met in-person, who appreciated the topics addressed here. I’m grateful for your trusts, which I don’t take lightly. Thank you for reading, and then sharing my articles and essays on Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.

Thank you for carrying my words farther than this blog could take them. As I’m writing this, my blog is at 25,337 hits. Since I’ve started, you helped me average about 1,000 hits a month — something that was good to mention in my resumes and cover letters to potential employers in the new media industry.

The average monthly hit count answered their questions about my ability to drive traffic to a blog using social network websites, and my familiarity with Web Analytical Tools to track that traffic. Thank you for the ongoing lesson in accountability. With every issue covered here, I tried to write about them, responsibly.

Recently, independent online media sources started picking up my posts published here. So, here’s a shout-out to those social media gurus on twitter for extending their platform: @contemplation (for “The Literary Daily”), @punchj (“Punch’s Library Daily”), @FarhanDanish (“The Blogs Daily”) and @IMPACTHIRING_BR (“IMPACTHIRING SOLUTIONS.COM”).

In January, the WordPress staff crunched the numbers to check this blog’s overall health for 2010. And, according to them, “the Blog-Health-o-Meter” read: “Wow.” Thank you for ensuring the overall health of this blog and for a wonderful two years!