Blogs come and go.  Several great new blogs came online in 2006 and we lost a few.

Watchdog Milwaukee grew from an average of just 254 unique visitors per day last January to almost a thousand per day today.  We owe thanks to our readers as well as the tipsters who made it possible for us to scoop the mainstream media so many times this year.

Our friend Xoff hung up his blogging shoes and a spectacular investigative reporting blogger, Cory Liebmann took another path.  Now Carrie Lynch is hanging it up, making a tri-fecta of democratic leaning blogs hosted on WisOpinion to have hung it up.

Our friend Bill Stephen closed his blog but joined Watchdog Milwaukee as an occasional story author and now we hear that MLM Liberal is hanging it up. 

So the question is why?

I look at Watchdog Milwaukee as a stress reliever which allows some biting commentary mixed with the occasional whimsy.  Do these other bloggers find it to be a task to write?  Writing should be fun and I'll admit that if I didn't enjoy writing and doing the occasional investigation, I wouldn't be doing it.

In the interest of keeping you informed on what's happening here, I'm taking a break between Christmas and New Years and Janice M. Eisen, an author and community columnist who has written for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, has volunteered to fill in for me. 

At the same time as writers left the blogosphere, we spawned one.  Former Watchdog Milwaukee writer (and Journal-Sentinel reporter) Gretchen Schuldt started Milwaukee Rising — a blog I just can't get enough of.

This year we learned about blog statistics and discovered much to our chagrin that we were looking at the wrong numbers — we thought we had nearly 10,000 visitors per day (that's our amount of "hits") but the figure of nearly 1000 per day (visits) is more accurate.