One Million, Three Hundred and Seventeen Thousand, Six Hundred and Forty Five words later (including the words in this post), or Two Thousand and Thirty Nine posts later (which does not count well over a hundred guest posts on other blogs, including e-Sourcing Forum, Supply Excellence, Procurement Leaders, Deal Architect, 2 Sustain, and @ Risk), and Sourcing Innovation (SI) officially turns four. Although not an extraordinarily long time, even in net-time, it is exceptionally significant in blog-time, especially for a blog that posts twice a day, every day, 7/365.

It was a fabulous year! Growth continued to the point where Sourcing Innovation not only maintained its undisputed place as the second most trafficked blog in the space any way you want to look at it, but temporarily obtained top blog status last summer, a position it held for over two months! Plus, it’s reach on the search engines is still, on average, three times that of any other blog or publication in the space. And with the demise of Purchasing, growth is exploding, especially now that Dick Locke (who was sailing) Norman Katz (who has been writing a book on Detecting and Reducing Supply Chain Fraud) are coming off of sabbatical and Robert Rudzki is joining them on SI as a regular contributor!

And even though the past year brought you unparalleled series on The Role of Optimization, Service Leadership, Overcoming Cultural Differences in International Trade, Spend Analysis, Global Sourcing Myths and Capabilities, and Strategy, when the content on this blog grew greater in breadth than the entire Harry Potter series, I’d bet that the best has not yet been written. Even though this blog has covered topics from analysis through x-emplification and vendors from AECsoft through WisdomNet, there’s still much more to tell. There are hundreds of topics and hundreds of vendors with stories to tell — and even though the Sourcing Maniacs made a herculean effort with their 2008 Vendor Tour, they only scratched the surface. They didn’t even make it over to Europe, which is exploding onto the sourcing and procurement scene. BravoSolution just topped the Gartner Magic Quadrant and the bohemian invasion is underway, led by iValua and b-Pack.

With our understanding of supply chain, and the world in general, increasing by the day, you can never stop learning — and never, ever, stop innovating. And that’s what Sourcing Innovation is all about, and that’s what it’s going to continue to cover, day-in, day-out, 7/365.

(So, if you’d like a piece of this action, at a cost less than your average Google ad-words or trade publication e-mail blast campaign on a per eyeball basis [because, when you get right down to it, it’s impressions that matter], check out the open pricing model and contact the doctor. You won’t be disappointed.)