Happy 10th birthday to Kottke.org

There's a very small club of people who've been blogging for ten years; We talked to a number of these experts last year to celebrate Dave Winer's 10th anniversary as a blogger, with more posts discussing Leslie Harpold, Michael Sippey and Harold Check. Today, another respected member of the blogging community joins that esteemed club, and we're thrilled to congratulate Jason Kottke  on ten years of blogging.

For the past 10 years, kottke.org has largely been all of the things people don't think of blogs as being: Carefully edited. Emotionally restrained. Even-handed. And yet, the site exemplifies all the things that drew so many of us to blogging in the first place: An elegant design, richly annotated with links, making smart use of its archives to add context and meaning.

Of course, we're Six Apart, so we're also proud that Jason blogs with Movable Type. Many of us at Six Apart consider Jason a friend and an influence and read his site regularly. So you could argue we're biased. Or you could simply argue that it's a testament to the fact that, if you have the talent, a blog can give a skinny kid from a small town in the middle of nowhere the ability to help inspire and influence an entire company, or even an entire industry.

Jason's work on the design of his blog has obviously been a huge influence on the design and voice of blogs overall. But that influence extends well past the simple visual design of blogs; Some fundamental parts of the structure of blogs that we now take for granted were innovations that Jason helped dream up and popularize. When we spoke to Paul Bausch  five years ago about the creation of permalinks, one of the great things to come out of that conversation was the quiet influence Jason had in simply attaching anchors to each of his thoughts.

There's much more of course, from helping the linkblogging format take off, to being an early promoter of tumblelogs, Jason has stayed interested in the evolution of the core building blocks that make blogs so powerful. And the entire blogging world noticed when Jason started to experiment with a micropatronage model that let him stay an independent, opinionated publisher without the challenges that advertising presents.

We've even seen some really good criticisms and praise of Six Apart from Jason; He'd (rightly) criticized us  at Six Apart for not blogging enough, and even for not doing enough to blow up the basic type-text-in-a-box paradigm that so much blogging technology has fallen in to. Jason has, of course, taken his fair share of lumps from the blogosphere too, from those who disagree with anything from his opinions to his business model. At the same time, there's been a great dialogue around insights like the idea that one of the key innovations in Vox wasn't merely the cool technology, but the way that community considerations were baked right in.

Finally, there's something to admire to Jason's being something like the Michael Jordan of blogging -- a talent who is consistently at the absolute top of the game for a full decade. It's easy to get some traffic just by being around a long time. But to be ten years on, and years past having already won a Bloggie for Lifetime Achievement, and still be named by the Guardian as the fourth most powerful blog in the world, and the highest-ranking one run by an individual, is a testament to the skills of one of our medium's true pioneers.

So, congratulations to Jason Kottke on celebrating 10 years of publishing kottke.org. Here's to the next ten years.