It’s been a year of ups and downs, a year of triumphs and trials, a bit of a rollercoaster year. But… it’s been a year! rabble.ca turned three over the weekend and, as any three-year-old does, we feel energetic and active and we move into our fourth year with — we hope not misplaced — optimism.

If we can feel optimism at this point, it’s certainly because of you, our readers. Readership continues to grow and we know we’ve become a significant part of your day as you look to make sense of a complex world by reading the “news for the rest of us” that isn’t widely available in mainstream media.

Last month, March 2004, we had 2,692,687 (2.7 million) page views; 177,873 visits; 9,931,048 (9.9 million) hits. There were about 66 million hit counts for the past year…and they’re consistently well over five million per month. And our April 2004 daily average, so far, is up 10 per cent over March — by far our best ever.

There are now 5471 members of babble, the lively discussion boards. And just two weeks ago, we rejoiced as the beloved auntie.com made her 300th contribution to our pages with her sage advice.

I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate the support you readers have given me as I approach my own first anniversary as editor. I hear from so many of you — with story suggestions, queries and submissions, links to interesting stories from around the world for our “netted news” section and, of course, the occasional critical critique. That’s okay. Because even when you’re annoyed with some of the choices I make and some of the stories I publish, you pretty much always have the grace to end your letters by saying, “keep up the good work.” I sense that many of you have a feeling of ownership of rabble.ca and that is a true compliment that any publication enjoys.

At rabble.ca, we continue to value our relationship with Alternatives, the Montreal-based NGO that has offered us so much support over the past year. We also remain tight with our sister sites, OneWorld.ca — the source of our “in cahoots” material — and Unseulmonde.ca.

And then there’s babble where the birthday party is already underway. It’s a pretty good-humoured party — but babble is not always about parties. The discussion ranges widely from feminism to sexuality, from recipes to laundry rage, from poetry to politics. And not all babblers agree on every topic.

The babbler Heywood Floyd puts it fairly bluntly: “I have very little in common with most babblers. This makes for not only some spirited discussions but some excellent learning experiences.” And he goes on to say, “I love it here. babble gives me the opportunity to see the world from the eyes of my ideological opposites. What I find is that we have far more in common than we’d like to admit.”

Another babbler, Mr. Magoo, also often finds himself in the minority during babble discussions: “To me, rabble/babble is a unique place that exposes me to ideas, opinions and points of view different from my own. I may not always agree with these ideas — sometimes I may not even understand them — but they give me a framework with which to clarify my own ideas and opinions, and serve as a second conscience of a sort. This may not seem all that special at first glance — there are many ways of keeping informed, after all — but when you consider how we often choose friends like ourselves, that our professional and intellectual lives are seldom structured so as to expose us to new ideas, and the influence and homogeneity of the popular media, I believe it’s no small thing at all.”

Gir Draxon is a frequent poster on the babble boards and, as others do as well, he can disagree with the majority view but he does so with respect. “I feel rabble is an important publication because it allows a different point of view to be expressed than we see in the mainstream media. While I might often disagree with the opinions expressed, it is important thatthe ‘progressives’ of our society have their voice heard. Democracycannot exist if dissenters are marginalized or silenced.”

And so babble is made up of a great variety of people — more of them expressing progressive views than not — but it’s possible that even those who proclaim their distance from those progressive views, would identify with the babbler known as skdadl: “I’ve made many friends on babble, most still virtual friends but a few now in real life. The youngest of the virtual friends is fifteen and the oldest is in his sixties — I don’t often think of differences like that among us, but when I do I’m still amazed at how easily babble breaks down social barriers that might have affected us otherwise. It certainly overcomes geographical ones, and in Canada that’s no small thing.”

We’ve had some hard times this year as well. Regular readers will recall our intense fund-raising drive of last fall. We were gratified with your response and it kept us going — for the time being. But because of our financial difficulties, we’ve had to say sad good-byes to some of our treasured staff, some of whom had been with rabble.ca since its beginning. We miss them every day.

But for now anyway, life goes on and we’re enjoying the idea of being three years old. No gifts please — we really have everything we need. Um, well… okay, you know where that donate button is, don’t you? Thanks so much for all your support — past, present and future.