It’s been three years since we opened Deep Thought.

Three years. It sure doesn’t seem that long.

It all started on november 23, 2004, when Pilky wrote the following:

Welcome to Deep Thought, we hope you enjoy your stay. In case you don’t know who we are then here is a brief description. We are a Mac Blog site. There are five writers all with a different views on the world and on Macs. So we hope that we all give you different views on the world of Apple. Anyway, enjoy!!

We started as a Mac site, of course, but expanded beyond that soon after.

When we started Deep Thought, I don’t think any of us expected to set the world on fire. We were a tiny little outpost on the fringe of the tech blogosphere. Three years later, we’re a somewhat larger outpost, but still a spec of dust compared with some sites out there.

Running a small site like ours hasn’t been easy. It’s hard motivating others to write, especially when you can’t pay them. It’s hard establishing any sort of regular readership.  There have been some days where I wonder why I continue to write for Deep Thought.

In the time that Deep Thought has been around, many smaller sites have come and gone. The once-fairly popular Apple-X? There hasn’t been a new post in two months.

The Mac Mind was once a bustling site geared towards teenage Mac users. It went offline sometime in mid 2005 with a “coming soon” page up announcing a new look. The new look never came until December of last year when Anthony Cole tried to bring it back. The Mac Mind was offline again in a few months, as it experiences many of the same problems we have here. It is now just a repository of links to other Mac sites.

The Different District hasn’t seen an update since March. iOnMac has a fairly active forum, but hasn’t seen a front page update in over a month.

It’s sad to see a small site decline and eventually fail. It’s sad to see people pour hours and hours into their site, only to lose interest and watch it die.

And yet, here after three years, Deep Thought is still alive. It’s not pretty. It’s not really healthy. But this baby—this site that I have spent more time on in the last three years than anything else—is still alive.

We here at Deep Thought are working on something that will hopefully be able to help small sites stay viable. We want to give other sites like Deep Thought a fighting chance. I won’t get into details now, but we call it M----- T----- P-----, and it will be a new way for small sites to connect with each other. Hopefully we will have more details to share (like what “M----- T----- P-----” stands for) sometime next year.

Support your local indie tech site

Need I say more? There are tons and tons of small tech sites out there waiting to be read. Give these little guys a chance. Give them a visit. Leave a comment. Let the writers know that someone is actually reading. We appreciate it when we see that our readers actually appreciate the work we put into our sites.

It’s all about you

You, the readers, that is. If it wasn’t for the fact that we actually have measurable traffic and some regular readers, I would have quit long ago.

To those who have been reading Deep Thought since the beginning, thank you for sticking around with us.

To those who just found us this morning, thank you for bothering to click a link that brought you here. Stick around a while.

To all of you reading this, thank you for making the past three years a blast.

To anyone who has ever written for Deep Thought, thank you for the time and effort you have put into this site. You make Deep Thought what it is today.

To the software companies and others who have taken part in our annual giveaways, thank you.

Here’s to three great years, and here’s hoping for many more.

-Nick Mediati
23 November 2007