Yesterday’s news and events post by Dennis was the 1,000th post here at ErieBlogs.com.

The site has grown and changed since its birth in 2003 as a very modest link directory housed on personal blog. These days, we’ve built a pretty cool community that hangs out both online and offline. We’ve added features like the BlogBrowser, the Job Board, the Everything Erie Wiki and more.

Thank you, local bloggers, for the work you do on your blogs. We’re tracking over 70 blogs now with more being added every week. There are such diverse viewpoints and such a wide range of topics covered here, from politics to local media to life away from Erie to crafts like beading, cooking and scrapbooking to life with children and without. We all have certainly learned quite a bit from each other.

We’d also be remiss without thanking the readers of this site. Thank you for your feedback and the news, events and job postings you send us. Don’t forget there are many ways to get your daily dose of ErieBlogs.com: our RSS feed, our daily email blast, or adding our content to your favorite start page. Here’s a few links to get your started:

Now, on to some big news.

Back in August, after another period of downtime from our web host, we asked you readers if you’d mind if we added some advertising to the site to offset the costs of better, more reliable hosting. 85% of respondents to our survey said they didn’t mind having an advertising area on the page.

After some discussion between Dennis, Mike, and Rich, we came to the conclusion that the best way to go about this was to make ErieBlogs.com official (sort of speak) so that advertisers would see us as something more than just a fly-by-night blog. And of course we are more than just a website with a pretty face. ErieBlogs.com gets on average more than 100,000 page hits and over 15,000 unique visitors a month (most hailing from and around Erie, PA). Getting to those numbers didn’t happen overnight and we’re proud of the work we’ve done to get there.

As of October 1st, 2007, ErieBlogs.com is operating under the business ErieBlogs, LLC. Yes, we’ve formed a limited liability company, organized here in the great State of Pennsylvania.

What does this mean? Well for starters much will remain the same. You’ll get the same useful daily news digests from Dennis, easy access to local bloggers, and all those other great features discussed above. Our hope is that with a little bit of revenue we can improve these services as well as begin to add new ones. We’re excited and hope you are too.

In the meantime, if you are a business and are curious how advertising on ErieBlogs.com will benefit you, drop us a line using our contact page. Although we’re not quite ready to introduce our advertising packages, we think you will be pleasantly surprised with our prices and our audience reach.

Thanks again everyone and have a great weekend.