It's our birthday. Our first one. We didn't say anything earlier, because, well, we didn't want to make you feel like you had to find a cute e-greeting card to send us.
But now that it's here, we don't feel quite so embarrassed. We've put up 864 posts and you all have dropped 5,426 comments since Kevin and I opened the blog a year ago with this post about journalists furtively meeting with sources. Here's the first two months where we were just figuring out what an image tag was.
But we soon got our FTP on.
We introduced the world to the Series of Tubes, used our familiarity with the WebMD website to diagnose an internet prankster as a "sociopath," showed you how to check if your packets are being inspected by jackbooted NSA geeks, proved to you that global warming shrinks your brain, taught you how to hack into janky convenience store ATMs, and added the blog world's only end-to-end encrypted tip line.
In what's either a brilliant marketing move or the lamest thing we ever pulled on our own blog, we changed our name from the incredibly obscure 27BStroke6 to the Wolf Blitzer-inspired THREAT LEVEL.
Along the way, Luke O'Brien joined up, pounding the marble pavement of Washington D.C., Kim Zetter logged in to sort out the real from fake conspiracies in e-voting, and we snake-charmed ex-National Journal reporter Sarah Lai Stirland into keeping track of the online shenanigans of the 2008 presidential campaign.
There's more fun in store for the next year, including a new logo (though we'll reward anyone who comes up with one we like better).
And thanks to you all for stopping by -- arguing in the comment sections, correcting us and feeding us tips. It certainly wouldn't be any fun without ya'll.
Photo: Kris Arnold
