Gowanus Lounge is entering its third year today and we’re celebrating with a new design and some other changes. In our first two years, we’ve posted more than 7,000 items and covered an awful lot of territory. When we put up our inaugural post on April 27, 2006, there was still very little development on the Williamsburg waterfront, the Atlantic Yards development hadn’t been approved, demolition was just getting underway for the Ikea on the Red Hook waterfront, the Coney Island drama hadn’t yet unfolded and the real estate market in Brooklyn was exploding. We didn’t know we’d end up writing as much as we have about quality of life and safety issues related to new construction or things like the Roebling Oil Field. News has taken us in many directions that we never anticipated.

We’re grateful to a lot of people for their help and support in our first two years. Curbed founder Lockhart Steele encouraged us to start blogging in the first place and has been a big supporter. We started contributing to Curbed a couple of weeks after starting GL and today we blog full time there. We’ve learned an incredible amount about blogging from Lockhart and from our Curbed colleague Joey Arak. Brownstoner’s Jonathan Butler has been generous with links and support and we count everyone on the Brownstoner team as a friend. Gothamist‘s Jake Dobkin has always been encouraging and given us valuable advice, while Jen Chung, Dave Hogarty, Jen Carlson and the rest of the staff have sent us tens of thousands of readers with links. The crew at New York Magazine’s Daily Intelligencer has always been more than cool with links that make us smile as have the good people at CityRoom.

When we started blogging, there were “blogs” and “bloggers” and everyone seemed to fit under that one umbrella. Today, the genre has developed so much that those labels have been rendered almost meaningless. Some of us practice online journalism and others do very personal blogs. There are news blogs, neighborhood blogs, advocacy blogs and so many others. Like “newspapers” or “television” or “indie rock,” the word “blog” isn’t even adequate to characterize the profession any longer. And, it is now a profession for some of us. In these last two years, blogging has changed the way that news and information are disseminated and, in the process, has begun to shape and influence public policy here in Brooklyn. In early 2006, a development like 360 Smith Street in Carroll Gardens would have gotten little coverage. Today, it is sometimes covered every day. It is one of hundreds of developments, projects, issues and policies that are never noted by the big daily papers and only covered weekly by Brooklyn print media. GL and other blogs can cover Brooklyn news within minutes or hours an, in the process, give voice to hundreds of citizen journalists who function as our eyes and ears.

We’ll save our full reflections about Brooklyn blogging for another time. In the meantime, we want to say a huge thank you to the readers that have sent us tips (who we can’t identify, but they know who they are) and to those that have contributed to GL. We’re now identifying our contributors on the right, but we want to say a special thank you to Miss Heather, who has literally supplied us with hundreds of posts and to our Carroll Gardens Correspondent, F. Jasmin Adams, who has been generous with both information and images. We also want to acknowledge Louise Crawford of OTBKB who is so supportive of Brooklyn bloggers in general.

We’ll be adjusting our posting schedule somewhat, putting up more items throughout the day rather than front loading everything in the morning. In some cases, this might mean that posts on topics that get swarm coverage by a number of blogs might appear after coverage has come elsewhere, but we think there are more benefits to spreading out content a bit more. Also, we’re getting used to a new platform, so the volume of posts might be somewhat diminished for a day or two as software issues consume more of our attention than usual.

Most of all, thanks to all of you for readings and for your comments and feedback. Onward with our third year.