About seven years ago, Matt Haughey, Paul Bausch and Meg Hourihan ran a very cool early blogging community called Blogroots, which acted as watercooler for conversations about the evolution of the then-nascent medium.

I’d found some links to the site in the Web Archive a few months ago, and sent them around, and then was delighted to see one of them surface on its own again today. Gawker Media’s Erin Pettigrew used the initial thread about the launch of Gizmodo (Gawker’s first title), along with my post at the time as a jumping-off point for a look at Gawker’s success seven years later. I’m a big fan of using the history of our blogs as a record of the lessons we’ve learned over the years, and I’m glad I wasn’t (overly) harsh about Gawker’s chances.

As far as advertising on blogs goes, though, I’ll admit I’ve become a bit of a convert to the potential. Today’s conversation prompted a quick glance at the numbers for the biggest blog advertising platforms in the U.S., revealing something kind of interesting:

Not too shabby, considering it’s only been a little over a year since Six Apart Media launched. Another little trivia note — that first Gizmodo design, which inspired such an interesting conversation, was designed and implemented by Mena and Ben Trott, working as sort of an ancient ancestor of today’s Six Apart Services. It’s fun to see that everybody involved is not only still blogging, but succeeding at it.