Nine years of BrontëBlog

BrontëBlog back in 2005

Today marks the 9th anniversary of BrontëBlog. Nine years don't seem like so very much but years in technology should be measured perhaps differently, like dog years or some such thing. Let's take a look back at the technological context BrontëBlog was born into back in 2005: YouTube was founded in April (one month after the infamous Megaupload), Facebook was still only used in US universities and a few high schools. Twitter doesn't existed yet. There were not Iphones and Android has just been acquired by Google and no one knew what exactly it was about. Blackberry or Nokia were the mobiles. The USB flash drivers began to replace floppy disks on computers. No dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive... no cloud at all. In 2005 almost 40 % of internet users still used dial-up.

It was the year that New Orleans was hit by Katrina and the July 7th bombings in London. The year that the Huygens probe landed in Saturn's satellite Titan and also the year when the Catholic Church chose a new pope, Benedict XVI. And also the year when the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise was aired (ending 18 years of uninterrupted Trek on TV), BBC aired Bleak House and Brokeback Mountain was the film everybody talked about.

And in September of that year we decided to take a look at what and how the Brontës were doing in popular culture. Nine years later we can confidently say that they turned out to be doing fantastically well. We have said this before but we never cease to be amazed by the projects, inspiration and commentary they generate constantly. This blog publishes an average of two posts a day--not every day is filled with news of a new discovery, a new exhibition, a new book or a new adaptation, but at the very least each and every day the Brontës are mentioned by someone somewhere in the world, perhaps miles away from the world the Brontës knew and certainly decades after they died. Which, if you really stop to think about it, is amazing.

This nine years have been a labour of love but we can't boast of really having done it on our own: at some point or another we have had the help of individual readers and writers, authors, publishing houses, the Brontë Society itself. And there's always of course the readers and subscribers of this blog: here on Blogger and elsewhere in unexpected places back in 2005 such as Facebook or Twitter. We would like to offer a heartfelt thank you to anyone who has ever stopped and read one of our posts with interest.