The 5th. birthday of Kajakwoerden.blogspot.com

Dec. 2005 - the first blog post: a report of an early morning winter-paddle with Alex and Guus on the Nieuwkoopse Plassen in a very calm state.

It's social media, and yet I almost missed this anniversary: Five years (and some days ago) I typed up the very first blog-post on Kajakwoerden.blogspot.com. To be exact it was the second start of Kajakwoerden: I started my seakayaking related blog in the MSN-Spaces-portal a few months earlier, but changed over to Blogger because I got irritated by the weird limitations of MSN. I wrote the first blog-posts in Dutch, and was surprised to notice that the blog from the very beginning attracted a serious number of foreign visitors. A few weeks later Mark Rainsy published a link to the Kajakwoerden-blog on the UK Sea Kayaking Forum and made a joke about the funny Dutch language. I reacted with a first post in English but didn't give the experiment more than a month. Soon more than 70 % of the visitors was non-Dutch. I never expected I would write more than a hundred English-posts a year! Actually I have to thank you - the reader - for making it to this long and intense experience! I would never have put this effort and time in the blog if it weren't for all the contacts with the people while doing this! It's social media - and a discovery for this clumsy Internet-user.

In five years a lot has changed. In the early years most visitors came to the blog by referring URLS on blogs of other seakayakers (some fellow bloggers of the first days: Axel, Bonnie, Derrick, Wenley, Michael) or International Kayaking Forums. Blogs related to sea kayaking were quite rare, now portals like Playak or Paddlingplanet.com list hundreds of them. Most visitors now find their way to the blogs by bookmark or by Google-search. Since early 2010 the number of visits is slowly decreasing. Blogging seems to be over its top. Is Facebook the new medium? The network is the same. I suppose that the 250 friends on Facebook cover a big part of the regular visitors of the blog. I admit that recently (especially since I've got a Smartphone) I am also more active on Facebook than on this blog. But it's no replacement - I like the Blogger journal - the first journal I kept more than a week...

Paddling also changed in five years - a flashback with pictures of the December posts on Kajakwoerden.blogspot.com over the past five years (nice memories!):

Dec. 2006 - an epic winter trip with Bernhard, Freya, Guus, Nils and Tanja - rescues in breaking surf, a Hilleberg tent heavily damaged in the storm...

Dec. 2007 - everything green - is this winter? Paddling on the Grecht with Guus.

Dec. 2008 - Turbulent, grey and cold water: the North Sea in the Voordelta - testing the performance of some new seakayaks with René.

Dec. 2009 - Winter paddling with Govert in the Biesbosch - very cold, most creeks were frozen - it was difficult to get access to the water because the banks of the river were frozen.

Dec. 2010 - Stuck in the snow - skipped several sea kayaking activities because of the chaos on the roads...