HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO... US!

WildeBoomerz is one year old today!

It was May 30, 2008, when this lowly little playlist narrative went out to some president whose name we forget. And from there... well, here we are, a couple of hundred posts and eleven thousand readers later. Who knew?

Over the past year, what started as a procrastination destination for a tiny group of half a dozen people has gone international. While the US, UK, Canada, and India bring in our primary audiences, we've also drawn readers from all of these corners of the globe:

Australia
Brazil
Bulgaria
Belgium
Colombia
China
Dominican Republic
Estonia
Finland
France
Greece
Germany
Hong Kong
Indonesia
Israel
Ireland
Italy
Mexico
Netherlands
Nigeria
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Portugal
Poland
Russia
Romania
Serbia
Spain
Switzerland
South Africa
Slovenia
Sweden
Turkey
Taiwan
Venezuela

The most-read post in the past year was a rant against a stupid game show, followed closely by a discussion of Extenze, a topic that saw WB staff brainstorming di... er, anatomy puns for a couple of hours via IM. President Obama's iPod-or-Zune preferences were important to lots of people, but classic toys were, too — interesting to see the search terms that brought readers in looking for Jarts, Creepy Crawlers, and the rest. Rating a little site called Rate My Professors comes in as the fifth most popular topic, and random rantings about voicemail and the pronunciation of Iraq finished up the top six.

In the browser wars, Microsoft has the biggest user base (surprise) at 41% — but Firefox, Safari, and Opera outranked that at a combined 53%, and Google's Chrome browser managed to grab one percent for its startup self. (Note to those 0.48% still using Netscape: it's time to let go.)

Similarly, Microsoft Windows is the dominant OS for readers at 61%, but Mac OS X showed a respectable 23% and Linux users stopped by three percent of the time. (Anonymous systems made up the rest, as with browsers.) The biggest not-surprise: Windows Vista is running on only 11% of the PCs, with XP and Windows 2000 on the other 89%. Given the fact that Vista-based machines we've used at work have taken up to nine minutes to boot up fully, we totally understand the reluctance of our readers to install it.

The past year saw some great guest-written features (the Rothbury review is up in the top ten most read posts), and also brought in a couple of regularly contributing writers in Pinkmingo and Nighthand. Both of those contributors experienced school transitions in May, though, with Pinkmingo transferring to the big university down the road and Nighthand graduating to enter the scary and depressing "we have no positions, sorry" world of work. We hope they'll continue to write when they can.

Oh, and to clear up one burning question: Since we're named after a brand of guitar strings that are named after a guitar player, the blog is pronounced wild-boomers, not will-da-boomers. Meanwhile, we're very glad that you've chosen to stop by our pop-cult playground for a few minutes, because if a blog falls in the forest but there's no one there to read, it definitely makes no sound.