Doing Things No One Else Can Or Will – Steve

It all started with a debate that never happened.

Well, that’s not exactly true. You see, I had just started a local cutting edge blog that allowed visitors to debate. Sound familiar? Anyway, a few emails were exchanged between Brian and myself, and I was told The Dagger was founded by a few ex-Aegis reporters. So offered a challenge. I was going to write an article on my site explaining why I thought newspapers should get out of the business of charging for their content online, as our local county newspapers did. The Dagger would host the counterpoint.

Instead, we created the new dagger at daggerpress.com. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of emails were exchanged. Turns out we had very similar goals. And better yet, they could write, and I could code.

We hatched a plan. We were going to kill the original Dagger. I had convinced the team to move to our own domain and hosting, which would give us more control over the site. Just two weeks later, on November 19th, 2007, we went live with a brand new design with big goals.

Did we reach them? You tell me.

Just this past month, August, The Daggerwelcomed almost 10,000 unique visitors. That’s not “hits”. That’s people coming to the site after hearing about it from their friends and family, using search engines, or even hearing about us on the radio. Sure, it includes spammers too, but that’s the price of fame. The Dagger has received 3,700 spam comments, most dealing with porn. It’s our goal that you never see any of it on the site. Unless you want to, you sick bastards.

We have experimented a lot with the design and layout. I’m sure many of you have come to the site and see something out of whack. Sorry. I can’t help myself sometimes.

But these experiments are designed to give you, the faithful Dagger reader, a better experience. Every article we write gets a latitude and longitude, when available, and can be accessed on out Dagger Maps page. Every article that is tied to a specific town our city in the county can be quickly accessed from our menu. We have been posting every local event we can find in our public calendars.

And this is just the beginning. We want to do things no else is doing. And it’s all for you.

And now, some numbers.

For those interested, here are some of The Dagger’s vital statistics during its first 12 months:

– 268 stories

– 5,915 total comments

– roughly 20,000 unique visitors

And here is a short list of recent phrases typed into search engines that have brought readers to The Dagger. Can you find the correlations?

a shocking pain throughout body at night
siesta in africa the way they take a nap
charlestown races and slots jingle
one two three me and you
best looking lpga active members
el monstruo de cuadrangular
the state quarters – have they made alaska arizona & hawaii?
little football skits
sick off pizza
what does up in smoke saying mean
is fallston middle school grouped homogeneously
my girlfriend went to a mosh pit
how to dive without making a splash
mother wrestles son
janet jackson s boob black magic ritual
a little green around the gills
how to skip trains
is stallone sick
what dinosaur could eat the most?
i would like to be bound and gagged
if popping your pants is funny than call me miles davis
what does jim kennedy like to do