It’s been more than two years now that neweurasia has been around the Central Asian blogosphere - high time to write a Happy Birthday note! Thanks to all of our readers, contributors and supporters for making this project come this far! Check out the first post on the homebase and click around to see where it all started.

To let you know where we’ve been coming from, we actually need to rewind to 2004, when Chris Schwartz and Ben Paarmann founded Thinking-East - neweurasia’s predecessor website. With a focus on news and analysis generated by people from the ground, we have shed light at under-reported issues and given space to young and bright minds from day one.

Concentrating on the strengths that our website showed when reporting on Central Asia and the Caucasus, neweurasia was the logical continuation. Blogs quickly became our preferred medium - since they meant less editing and quicker and more direct publishing. We went live in the summer of 2005, with all country blogs operational later that year.

neweurasia wouldn’t be around today without the many and mostly “Western” volunteers who helped to set up the website in the beginning: Their help and sharp pens quickly turned neweurasia into one of the most visited blogs on the region. This group included Claire, Katy, Marianna, Peter, Rico, James, Neil, Jeremy, Nick to name but a few.

Neither would neweurasia be around today without the energy and dedication of the person behind the technology: Ollie from Berlin shared our enthusiasm from day one and has made sure ever since that our writers could make their voices heard without worrying too much about the technology behind the process.

We owe a big Thank You to Nathan Hamm, whose guidance and criticism was instrumental in shaping neweurasia in its early stages. Nathan’s blog Registan.net provided also much of the inspiration for us, not least as it set the “industry standard” in terms of breadth, insight and depth of discussion.

Along came 2006 when we teamed up with Transitions Online to take the project to the next stage and make it much more driven and maintained by people from the region. Using grant money from Dutch NGO Hivos, we began to hire local bridge bloggers: Yulia, Leila, Vadim and Shohruh. They quickly started adding a much more local and authentic taste to our reporting.

By beginning to publish in Russian (and later the local national languages), neweurasia slowly developed itself into a truly local website as well. It is no longer only a website that brings news from the ground to us people in the West, but also and primarily thrives and grows by being read in Kazakhstan, in Kyrgyzstan and in Tajikistan. Our two biggest single sources of visitors are Almaty and Bishkek. Kazakhstan accounts for almost 20% of our overall traffic, outranking both the US and the UK.

The other side of this new recognition in the region came with the news of our website being censored in Uzbekistan in the summer of 2006. Turkmenistan, a black hole in the cyberspace, still sends only two-digit numbers in terms of weekly visitors to our site. But at least there is an upward trend!

Being involved with neweurasia has meant a great deal of personal development for our bloggers: In September 2006, TOL and neweurasia gathered the region’s most promising cyber-activists and representatives from mainstream media in Almaty. We flew in many of our bloggers to Prague in June 2007 so that they could attend a two-week course on New Media.

neweurasia has published over 2,000 posts over the past two years, and to pick highlights from the huge list of topics covered is a tricky task, and probably reason enough to write several “Best-Of” posts. Our regular cross-blog surveys have seen many of our and other bloggers discuss the big issues facing the region today, from HIV/Aids, Religion in Politics, to views on the past and of the future.

Taking stock of the Stanosphere (thanks to Ian for the word invention) today, one can see many more blogs discussing anything from and about the region. Many more local blogs have joined the ranks of the few Western Central Asia buffs that started out blogging on this fascinating region several years ago. I hope it is not claiming too much to say that websites such as ours and - of course - Global Voices have been instrumental in bringing these two worlds together.