My blog turned ten years old this month so you’ll have to allow me a couple of indulgences.

First, I set myself up with a new blog theme. (If you’re reading this via email or an RSS reader, you’ll have to click through to check it out.)

Second, rather than reflect on ten years of my posts, I wanted to reflect on ten years of your comments. Over the last ten years, 4,600 people have written 20,000 comments on this blog, spanning two million words, the very first of which was written by Chris Lehmann.

My goal in blogging is to become curiouser and wiser with every post. Some of that happens in the post itself — through research, analysis, writing, etc — but so much of it happens in the comments.

To offer one current example, I posted Cathy Yenca’s method for teaching zero exponents last week. Forty comments later, my commenters offered two more methods for teaching them and helped me see how all three methods are related. I’m curiouser and wiser now than I was forty comments ago. That happened because of all of you and I wanted to thank a few you of you personally.

Most Comments

For example, here are the ten people who commented most often in every year that I’ve blogged.

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Longest Investment in My Work

And these are the ten people whose comments have helped shape my work for the longest span of time — from their first comment to their last.

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Most Featured Comments

In 2011, I started to understand the gift of an active comments section, and how that gift needed encouragement and tending. So I began to add particularly helpful comments to the body of the post itself in a “Featured Comments” section. I made sure my commenters knew they had been promoted, hoping the endorsement would encourage them to continue bringing that kind of value.

These are the twenty people whose comments have been featured two or more times since 2011.
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I sent a personal note of thanks to everybody mentioned in this post. Each person has made a significant donation of time, words, and insight to the project of making me curiouser and wiser.

Whenever people ask me how I got wherever it is I am right now, I always tell them about you, about how my ideas and thinking developed twice as fast as they had any right to. And I attribute that difference entirely to your time, words, and insight.

Wherever it is I’m going, I intend to get there exactly the same way.

Featured Comment

Chuck:

Congrats and well done! I think I remember that day back in 2007. I got to work, threw in a Nelly CD, fired up my Netscape browser and made my comment. Incidentally I drove the same Toyota Camry that I still drive to work. Later on I think I went home and watched Lost and then read about #hashtags