Master Resource turned one year old on December 26th. We have gone from a few hundred daily views to more than a thousand per day on average, and the quality and variety of our energy-related fare continues to improve.
Of the 4,100 ‘green blogs’ listed by Technorati, MasterResource consistently ranks in the top 50 and has broken into the top twenty. MasterResource is the top free-market energy blog with an All-Star list of nine principals and distinguished guest bloggers, including Robert Bryce, Indur Goklany, Mary Hutzler, Jim Manzi, Randall O’Toole, and Vaclav Smil.
Suffice it to say that we have exceeded expectations, and 2010 should see continued high quality and expanded reach and influence. We hope to increase our international presence and invite new voices into the energy and energy-related climate debates.
Worldview
MasterResource has documented the superior intellectual and practical case for free energy markets, which rests on these foundations:
- Energy, the master resource, is indispensable for modern society. Abundance, affordability, and reliability are necessary for the developed world to advance and paramount for the developing world to develop and prosper.
- The master resource depends on the ultimate resource of human ingenuity, which thrives under conditions of economic and political freedom.
- Energy freedom is based upon the foundations of private property and the rule of law where buyers, sellers, entrepreneurs, and owners are free to enter into mutually advantageous exchanges and agreements. Government is passive, keeping the peace and working to set rules where reasonably determined harms are avoided.
More specifically, MasterResource posts have explained:
In short, neo-Malthusianism is wrong and Julian Simon right in the main essentials. But the challenge remains to educate many academics, policymakers, and ‘Left” intellectuals that public policy activism must take into account not only ‘market failure’ but also analytical failure (false claims of market failure) and government failure (political waste in the proffered solution).
Some Statistics
At the one year mark, MasterResource has had 360 posts by 38 authors that attracted 2,300 comments. With our in-depth, scholarly posts, 177 categories were created, beginning with “About” and ending with “Zimmermann, Erich.” This index will make MasterResource a scholarly resource for many years to come. Indeed, the one-per-day, in-depth blogs can be thought of as an open-ended book of original contributions in the areas indicated.
In recent months, 43 percent of our views have come from referring sites (such as Tom Nelson or Roger Pielke Jr. or WattsUpWithThat), 29 percent from direct traffic, and 28 percent from search engines. Visits have come from 140 countries and territories outside of the United States. Average time on the site has been two minutes.
Thank You!
Lastly, all of us at MasterResource thank you the reader who have made our first year a very successful one. Keep the comments coming, and may the best ideas win in the contentious energy debates of 2010.
Appendix: The Original Vision (12/26/08)
Just one year ago I wrote in “A New Energy Blog“:
We are just getting started here, but some of us veterans of the energy debate from a private property, free-market perspective have teamed together to offer our thoughts on late breaking energy items. When I read my newspapers each day, I have some thoughts that I wish I could share with folks from a historical, worldview perspective. I think we all have something to add–and thus the inspiration for this endeavor.
We have a good core group of principal (and principled) bloggers, as well as a growing list of guest bloggers. We aim to post new material most every day. What we have to provide to the reader is frequent insight so that you visit us regularly.
There will be some trial and error, but this is the time to launch. President-elect Obama and his team have little concept of history in the energy debate–what W.S. Jevons said about renewable energies in the 1860s or the perils of U.S. energy regulation learned from wartime planning and the 1970s. Some of us will dwell on this to add some unique perspective to the debate.
By the way, our blog name is inspired by the late Julian Simon (1932–1998). He labeled energy “the master resource” because it is the resource needed to bring other resources from a state of nature to one of human usefulness. Simon also used the term “the ultimate resource” to describe human ingenuity. As the institutional economist Erich Zimmermann once said, resources come from the mind, not the ground.
Finally, I do hope mainstream journalists and many other open-minded individuals will come our way in the great energy and climate debates. The Obama march to energy statism needs a lot of debate. Big Government Democrats are not the cure to Big Government Republicanism. Oil, natural gas, and coal are middle class, working class energies. Wind and solar are for the rich. Windpower, in particular, as my friend Robert Bryce has put it, is the ethanol of electricity. Maybe, just maybe, these parasitic, inefficient energies will get the scrutiny they deserve from all sides of the political spectrum.
Congrats, guys, and Thanks for being here! We need all the help we can get against the AGW crowd.
Otter:
Glad to have you with us. I’d say the foe is the ALARMIST and NEO-MALTHUSIAN anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crowd.
They make the unmerited jump from a human influence on climate to the human influence being bad. Some do this by exaggerating the human influence (such as uncritically accepting the high-sensitivity climate models); others in the policy activism camp think nature is optimal and humans just should not be a part of things.
How to get natural scientists who just don’t like free-market capitalism per se (they feel ‘left out’ of progress, somehow) is a real challenge. I just hope the ‘government failure’ toward energy will get them to see ‘market failure’ in a new light when it comes to endorsing government intervention in the name of ‘energy sustainability.’
Congrats. I’m a big fan of your blog. I’ve linked to many of your blog’s postings and will continue to do so. I consider yours to be one of the best and a ‘must read’ for my own education/knowledge.
With that said, please don’t become a “legend in your own mind”. I started my site about the same time as yours and I’m at the 200k mark in views; I am a nobody; I have no all-star names posting for me; I have basically a ‘no comment’ policy on my postings that would attract return visits; no Facebook presence; and, so on. And to keep ‘bragging rights’ really in context, ClimateDepot.com started several months after both of our efforts, and now Marc M. is averaging about 200K views per month. Good for him; humbling for the rest of us.
My point? Yes, one needs to stay blog-humble and just keep delivering the quality content. Your readership will continue to climb significantly because of your great quality, not because of periodical “view” hype.
C3 Editor, http://www.c3headlines.com
Humility is in order, but for a site that posts only once per day for six days a week–versus other more ‘newsy’ or summation sites that have short posts and comments through the day–MasterResource has found a niche of note.
This said, folks should visit your (also) new site. It has a lot of information and is a bit different from Climate Depot on one side and WattsUpWithThat on the other.
We all need to find our space, and a group blog such as MasterRecource may be the way to go in an increasingly crowded and specialized blogosphere.
Yep, for one posting per day, you’ve done extremely well.
How about more than 1 per day, though? I certainly would enjoy (learn) reading more from your experts. They are good, very good.
This has been a great blog for me, and I have used the various articles to support various arguments about the use of energy and varous government policies towards it in a range of conversations. I look forward to its continuation, and I congratulate the participating authors on their erudite and insightful writing.